Page 1 of 2 The opium wars in Afghanistan
By Alfred W McCoy
In ways that have escaped most observers, the Barack Obama administration is
now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which
there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.
After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama
launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40am on February 13, 2010, in a
remote market town called Marjah in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province. As
a wave of helicopters descended on Marjah's outskirts, spitting up clouds of
dust, hundreds of US Marines dashed toward the town's mud-walled compounds
through fields sprouting opium poppies.
After a week of fighting, US war commander General Stanley
McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice president and Helmand's
provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the general's new-look
counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing government to remote villages just
like Marjah.
At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the
vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted anger.
"If they come with tractors," one Afghani widow announced to a chorus of
supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will have to roll over me and
kill me before they can kill my poppy."
For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of government
control, however contested, brought with it a perilous threat: opium
eradication.
Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely
unaware that Marjah might qualify as the world's heroin capital - with hundreds
of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick houses, regularly
processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin. After all, the
surrounding fields of Helmand produce 40% of the world's illicit opium supply,
and much of this harvest has been traded in Marjah.
Rushing through those opium fields to attack the Taliban on day one of this
offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the
Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerrillas
whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants. "You can't win this war
without taking on drug production in Helmand Province," said one US Embassy
official just back from inspecting these opium districts.
Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul on Sunday, National Security Adviser
James L Jones assured reporters that Obama would try to persuade Afghan
President Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to
the narco-traffickers". The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of the
economic engine for the insurgents".
Just as these Marjah farmers spoiled General McChrystal's media event, so their
crop has subverted every regime that has tried to rule Afghanistan for the past
30 years. During the CIA's covert war in the 1980s, opium financed the
mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as president Ronald Reagan called them) who
finally forced the Soviets to abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist
client state.
In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the country,
lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and profiting from
opium - and then, ironically, fell from power only months after reversing
course and banning the crop. Since the US military intervened in 2001, a rising
tide of opium has corrupted the government in Kabul while empowering a
resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have taken control of ever-larger parts of
the Afghan countryside.
These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise in
Afghanistan's opium harvest - from just 250 tonnes in 1979 to 8,200 tonnes in
2007. For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has accounted for as
much as 50% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and provided the
prime ingredient for over 90% of the world's heroin supply.
The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three war-torn
decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it defies solution
by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its most inept and least
competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total
eradication, the George W Bush administration dithered for seven years while
heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and
crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai.
In recent years, opium farming has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly
20% of the country's estimated population, and funds a Taliban insurgency that
has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.
To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in poor nations
with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics,
binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of
counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state's authority. When
the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task
becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the
Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.
Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in
networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of
production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for
harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and
problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question
Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify
a full-blown narco-state?
The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan
wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years - the CIA
covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by
US$900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the US invasion, occupation,
and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has
tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military
success - a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the
world's number one narco-state.
CIA covert warfare, spreading poppy fields
Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war
against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret operations that it
conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia which stretch for 8,000
kilometers from Turkey to Thailand.
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was revving up, the United States first
mounted covert probes of communism's Asian underbelly. For 40 years thereafter,
the CIA fought a succession of secret wars along this mountain rim - in Burma
(now Myanmar) during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the
1980s. In one of history's ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist
China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia's opium zone along this same
mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region's
highland warlords.
Washington's first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded the
country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Seeing an
opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked
closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a 10-year CIA campaign to
expel the Soviets.
This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years.
First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare
led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its
traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing
dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of
conducting this covert warfare on its own, as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War
years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service
Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever-more problematic
ally.
When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as overall leader
of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington - with few alternatives - agreed.
Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan's
mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist
infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later,
murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in
May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its
key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside
Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.
Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's
covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan
borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen
guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early
1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant
supporters.
Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to
hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's protection. Between
1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium production grew 10-fold - from 250 tonnes to
2,000 tonnes. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan
guerrillas, the US attorney general announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already
the source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia,
Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets,
while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to
1.2 million just five years later.
After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington just walked
away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million
dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an
infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords
prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital. Even when
Washington finally cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however,
Pakistan's ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its
long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.
Druglords, dragon's teeth and civil wars
Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in a lethal
brew as part of a brutal struggle for power. It was almost as if the soil had
been sown with those dragons' teeth of ancient myth that can suddenly sprout
into an army of full-grown warriors, who leap from the earth with swords drawn
for war.
When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the communist
regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three years, Pakistan
still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn, unleashed his artillery on the
besieged capital. The result: the deaths of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans.
Even a slaughter of such monumental proportions, however, could not win power
for this unpopular fundamentalist. So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban,
and in September 1996 it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the
Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of the
capital.
During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned heavily on
opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest to 4,600 tonnes
by 1999. Throughout these two decades of warfare and a 20-fold jump in drug
production, Afghanistan itself was slowly transformed from a diverse
agricultural ecosystem - with herding, orchards, and over 60 food crops - into
the world's first economy dependent on the production of a single illicit drug.
In the process, a fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented
way.
Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where clouds arrive
from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is an arid land. Its
staple food crops have historically been sustained by irrigation systems that
rely on snowmelt from the region's high mountains. To supplement staples such
as wheat, Afghan tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of
miles every year to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important of
all, farmers planted perennial tree crops - walnut, pistachio, and mulberry -
which thrived because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are
remarkably resistant to the region's periodic droughts, offering relief from
the threat of famine in the dry years.
During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated the
herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the orchards.
While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with firepower, the Taliban,
with an unerring instinct for their society's economic jugular, violated the
unwritten rules of traditional Afghan warfare by cutting down the orchards on
the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.
All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a Gordian knot of human
suffering to which opium became the sole solution. Like Alexander's legendary
sword, it offered a straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum.
Without any aid to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their
orchards, Afghan farmers - including some 3 million returning refugees - found
sustenance in opium, which had historically been but a small part of their
agriculture.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
