By Paul Tate
Heroin was not the natural drug of choice for the disenfranchised youthof the early 1980s. Before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, teenagers in working class run-down housing estates across Western Europe preferred to smoke marijuana, largely to block out the monotony of unemployed life.
All that changed in the early 1980s with the setting up of a "pipeline" by the Pakistani Intelligence Services and the CIA, and funded by Saudi largesse to channel arms and funds to Osama Ben Laden and the Afghan Mujahedeen.
As a quid pro-quo, a blind eye was turned to the heroin that began to flow the other way. This vast supply of cheap high-grade heroin didn''t take long to make its way to Europe''s cities, which have been struggling with the consequences ever since. Wide-scale heroin addiction, crime, gangsterism and corruption, not to mention CIA-trained Islamic extremists,
were just some of the consequences of Afghanistan Mark I.
Twenty-five years later, the country has once again reclaimed its No. 1 spot at the top of the world league of heroin producers. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan doubled between 2002 and 2003 to a level 36 times higher than in the last year of rule by the Taleban, according to White House figures.
Since the "war on terror" began, heroin production has soared by 1,400 per cent. According to the UN, the combined income of poppy farmers and smugglers last year was around $2.3 billion, a 6 per cent increase on the previous year and fifty per cent of Afghanistan''s legal gross domestic product.
British policy makers have been complaining of late that the US appears to be disinterested in combating the growing drug problem. Given that 95 per cent of the heroin sold on the streets of the UK originates in Afghanistan, as compared to only 5 per cent in the US, British anxiety
is understandable. But there are other reasons the US appears to be once again turning a blind eye to the booming opium trade.
One US official was quoted in Britain''s Guardian newspaper as saying: "You guys [the British] are here because you have a war on drugs, I''m here because we have a war on terror." But the real reason the US is reluctant to make a concerted effort to close down the drug laboratories is that some of its key allies in the Afghan government are thought to be up to their necks in drug money.
The US strategy in Afghanistan Mark II, as was the case in Afghanistan Mark I, is to turn a blind eye to heroin trafficking in order to pursue geopolitical goals. With the country already on the brink of anarchy, and US forces at full stretch, the last thing the Americans want is to
open up another front against the drug barons. Above all, the US doesn''t want to upset the current administration and the forthcoming elections scheduled for Oct. 9. Local commanders have, therefore, been allowed to use profits from drug trafficking to fund their private militias and amass power under the umbrella of the Bush administration''s war on terror.
But as Mirwais Yasini, Afghanistan''s Counter Narcotics Directorate chief, has pointed out, this strategy has already started to backfire. Alliances in Afghanistan follow the old dictum "my enemy''s enemy is my friend".
Today''s allies become tomorrow''s foes. Yasini says he is aware of at least two millionaire drug barons in league with Taleban rebels trying to destabilise the south of the country.
The consequences of inaction are clear: more money in the coffers of local warlords means more weapons which, in turn, leads to greater instability and undermines the fledgling democratic process. Afghanistan''s first post-Taleban elections have already been postponed twice due to increasing violence towards voters and officials. Attacks attributed to the Taleban
and its Al Qaeda allies have claimed more than 1,000 lives in the past 12 months. Only Kabul is considered secure. The rest of the country is in the grip of the warlords.
Efforts to disarm the militias, a precondition for elections under the Bonn 2001 accord, have stalled. Drug cultivation and trafficking are undermining the rule of law and providing a mass of funds for international terrorism and fuelling the Taleban revival, as well as a culture of addiction, crime, bribery and corruption in Afghanistan and the surrounding states.
At particular risk is the Central Asian state of Tajikistan. This desperately poor nation shares a 900-mile border with Afghanistan and is now the preferred route for traffickers. Analysts believe that the country is at risk of turning into a "narco-mafia state" controlled by an economy dependent on the flow of heroin and with links to Al Qaeda and regional Islamists
, precisely what the US claims it intervened in Afghanistan to prevent.
The country is already deeply affected by the fall out from the drugs trail. Tajikistan is experiencing a heroin epidemic akin to that experienced by Britain in the 1980s and all the misery that entails: drug-crime, social and family breakdown, wasted lives and increasing rates of HIV infection.
Meanwhile, in the towns and inner-cities of Europe, a new batch of cheap high-grade heroin is freely available on the streets. In Afghanistan Mark I, the proceeds of this trade went to fund the Mujahedeen against the Russians and, later, the infighting between rival warlords. Now, ironically, the heroin bought by European drug users is funding the forces of international terrorism and the Central Asian mafias - therefore increasing the possibility of wide-scale terrorist attacks and their ability to acquire chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons.
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