Pubdate: Mon, 09 Oct 2006
Source: New Statesman (UK)
Section: Cover Story
Copyright: 2006 New Statesman
Contact: letters@newstatesman.co.uk
Website: http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1067
Author: Misha Glenny
Note: Misha Glenny is writing a book on global organised crime
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

DRUGS AND TERROR: BRITAIN'S ROLE
[]

Tony Blair's ambition to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan
has failed miserably. More poppies are grown than ever, financing the
Taliban's resurgence and thus fuelling the war on terror.

Britain is caught in a vicious circle in Helmand Province. Its
ill-conceived war on drugs in Afghanistan may hand the Taliban a huge
victory - the collapse of Nato. It was perhaps appropriate that
Britain, as the biggest consumer of Afghan heroin, take on the role
of "lead nation" in counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. But this has
been prosecuted on the cheap while Nato has refused to back the poppy
eradication schemes that the British government regards as critical
to the success of the programme. Now the Taliban are making money
hand over fist from drugs, ensuring that their forces remain well
stocked with weapons.

The huge difficulties facing the British in Helmand are in timately
bound up with the expansion of opium production in the province under
the armed protection of the Taliban. In several centres of narcotics
production, and above all in Afghanistan and Colombia, profits from
the drug trade are sustaining large, highly motivated and
increasingly effective guerrilla or insurgency armies.

Yet I understand that advisers warned the cabinet quite specifically
that the money earmarked for the Helmand operation - £1.1bn in total
- - would not be sufficient to achieve its four aims of providing force
protection, security for local people, economic reconstruction and
poppy eradication. Either Britain would have to revise its mission
aims or it would need a much-increased budget. Gordon Brown was
adamant that the mission would not get a penny more, while Tony Blair
and John Reid, then defence minister, insisted the aims would not be
revised. The mission is now unravelling, just as predicted.

It all looked very different in October 2001, when Tony Blair
impressed commentators and the public alike with his statesmanlike
speech confirming Britain's participation in the US attack on
Afghanistan. In justifying his decision to join the western
coalition, he included one reason that clearly had nothing to do with
9/11: "We act also because the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban
regime are funded in large part [by] the drugs trade. Ninety per cent
of all the heroin sold on British streets originates from
Afghanistan. Stopping that trade is, again, directly in our interests."

Two birds with one stone - prosecute the war on drugs and the war on
terror simultaneously. Wipe out the drugs trade, and you drain the
swamp that nurtures terror. A cracking idea - if it had any chance of
working. Failure, by contrast, would be a disaster. Now, that very
disaster is upon us in Afghanistan and also in Colombia, where
Washington's twin wars on drugs and terror continue to wreak havoc in
the countryside and bolster left-wing and right-wing insurgency forces alike.

In Afghanistan, criminal syndicates based on a network of tribal
leaders are making huge profits by trafficking narcotics. They are
now also working hand-in-glove with the Taliban. Joel Hafvenstein, an
American who worked on the poppy eradication programme in Helmand
Province, described last month how five Afghan workers in his team
had been murdered in a Taliban attack at the behest of local drug
lords. To underscore the importance they confer on continued poppy
cultivation, the Taliban then attacked and killed mourners at the
funeral of one of the dead men. "The attacks were harbingers of the
Taliban resurgence that Helmand has seen in the last year," he wrote
in the New York Times.

The figures for opium production in Afghanistan over the five-year
period since Blair made public his resolve to destroy the crop are
nothing short of jaw-dropping. On 18 September, the head of the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, one of
the most resolute supporters of the war on drugs, seemed a broken man
as he announced that, since last year, the land used for poppy
cultivation had increased by 59 per cent to 165,000 hectares. "The
political, military and economic investments by coalition countries
are not having much visible impact on drug cultivation," he observed.
"As a result, Afghan opium is fuelling insurgency in western Asia,
feeding international mafias and causing a hundred thousand deaths
from overdoses every year."

At the same time, the Senlis Council, an international think-tank
specialising in drug policy, published a damning report linking the
failure of the coalition's poppy eradication programme with the
resurgence of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan, most notably in
Helmand. "The reconstruction effort in Afghanistan relies to a large
extent on the twin pillars of rural development and security," the
report notes. "Since the opium crisis lies at the heart of this
reconstruction nexus, eradication of the farmer's sole livelihood
raises the likelihood of further destabilising the country through
social protest, political unrest, insurgency, warlordism and internal
migration . . . Eradication programmes have had an extremely negative
impact on security in many parts of the country and . . . are
effectively undermining the Afghan central government."

The Taliban's unanticipated recovery in military capacity has
compelled British troops to downgrade, in effect, the more ambitious
aims of the Helmand deployment - to wit, beefing up the security of
the local population, economic reconstruction and poppy eradication.
In this way, the Taliban have been able to oversee a huge expansion
of poppy cultivation. And the more poppies that are grown, the
greater the Taliban's income. "If this deployment and the Nato
operation fail," said a source close to the Cabinet Office, "then
Nato collapses, which, given the proximity of Afghanistan to Europe,
is more of a problem for us than it is for the Americans."

Nearly forty years after Richard Nixon launched his uncompromising
war on drugs, the evidence is unambiguous: it does not reduce
consumption of hard drugs in the west, but it does guarantee huge
profits for drug traffickers. Cabinet Office research is quite clear
about this - we are making no inroads into these profits amounting to
hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Britain's modest funds for
the development of alternative livelihoods cannot compete with that
amount of cash - drug lords and the Taliban can corrupt anybody they
like in Afghanistan. And, in many areas, that is exactly what they
are doing. Afghanistan is heading towards an even greater meltdown
than its South American equivalent.

Lessons From Colombia

On a recent visit to Colombia, I went to the small town of Jamundí,
south of Cali. To get there, you drive by a soccer club owned by the
once-notorious Cali cartel, and then pass a bullring belonging to the
Ochoa brothers, Pablo Escobar's former partners in the Medellín
cartel. As the little town tails off, there is a welcoming sign at
the beginning of a drive lined by tall green hedges. Underneath the
words "My Little Home: psychiatric hostel" there is a phone number
and an arrow pointing down the drive. Two hundred yards further on,
around a couple of bends, the Little Home itself is set in delightful
grounds, although the rusty green-and-red iron gates and the
barbed-wire fencing are less welcoming.

At 5.30pm on 22 May 2006, the commander of one of Colombia's crack
special forces units stopped his convoy of three cars at just this
spot. Accompanied by nine men and an informant, he emerged from his
car and strolled towards the gates. The informant had assured him
that there was more to My Little Home than meets the eye, and that
the hospital was being used to store a large consignment of cocaine.

Without warning, a group of uniformed men who had been lying in wait
opened fire on the police unit, killing its commander instantly.
Twenty-eight gunmen had been hiding in the unkempt undergrowth
adjacent to the drive. "We were just preparing supper at the time,"
said a member of staff at the hostel, "when there was this tremendous
noise of gunfire from the gate." A couple of the police officers
threw themselves into the open drains for protection. "We heard these
men screaming, saying: 'Stop, please don't shoot! We're police!' And
then: 'We have wives and children.'"

The shooting went on for a full 20 minutes until every last policeman
was dead. The special forces were not executed by the Farc,
Colombia's 18,000-strong left-wing guerrilla movement, but by a
28-strong platoon of the regular army, the 23rd Mountain Brigade.
This came as a shock to everyone - to Colombia's president, Álvaro
Uribe, and to his government; and it came as a big and unpleasant
shock to the US Congress and President George W Bush.

"Friendly Fire"

The platoon commander, Colonel Bayron Carvajal, at first issued a
statement describing the incident as a tragic case of "friendly
fire". In fact, it bore the hallmarks of an execution. Furthermore,
as Attorney General Mario Iguarán looked a little closer, it looked
suspiciously as if the soldiers had been acting to protect whoever
owned the drugs. "This was not a mistake, this was a crime," he said
after a preliminary investigation. "They were doing the bidding of a
drug trafficker."

There was good reason for long faces in Washington when the news hit
DC. The US had recently handed over the last wedge of the $4.7bn it
had promised to Bogotá under Plan Colombia. This five-year plan,
introduced by the Clinton administration and expanded by President
Bush, had been designed to save the world from the joint scourge of
cocaine and the Farc. Eighty per cent of these funds was earmarked
for upgrading the military. With the exceptions of Egypt and Israel,
Washington lavishes more hardware and cash on Colombia's armed forces
than on any other in the world. The dual aim is to eradicate coca
plantations (and thus the cocaine business) and the left-wing
guerrillas. In Jamundí, however, those self-same recipients of
military aid were working on behalf of narco-traffickers and
murdering policemen.

Not only does money from narcotics corrupt key agencies engaged in
the war on drugs in Colombia, but it sustains the Farc, which
controls a chunk of territory the size of Switzerland. The Farc
derives most of its income from taxes imposed on the cocaleros
(coca-growing peasants). Rather quaintly, the Farc extracts 10 per
cent of the peasants' income in continuation of the Catholic Church's
tithe system. In exchange, they provide a secure environment for the
peasants to grow crops and supply services that the state cannot.

But it isn't only the Farc that deals in coke. The guerrillas' sworn
enemies, the paramilitaries who support the government of President
Uribe, also fund themselves by the sale of cocaine to the United
States. Although some have disarmed in a recent deal with Uribe, they
continue to wield influence over politicians and the military.
Perhaps most disturbing is that just 3 per cent of Colombia's GDP, at
most, derives from the cocaine trade, yet this is sufficient to
sustain two freelance armies - the Farc and the paramilitaries -
which have up to 50,000 men, women and children under arms. Cocaine
production was up 6 per cent again this year and the price in Britain
and the US continues to fall.

In Afghanistan, however, the UN reports that since the fall of the
Taliban, opium is a staggering 51 per cent of GDP, rendering it
impossible for the central government in Kabul to impose any
effective control on the country outside the capital. That is despite
the assistance of Nato's 19,000-strong force there. Far from cleaning
up the scourge of cheap heroin on Britain's streets, as Blair
promised in 2001, the intervention in Afghanistan has become an
epicentre of organised crime, insurgency and terrorism that nourishes
all manner of organisations, from the Turkish smack cartels, through
the despotic leaders of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and on above all
to al-Qaeda, whose prime source of income is the Afghan opium trade.
Perhaps Bush is right in his presumptuous claim that the war on
terror will be the defining struggle of the new century: it could
hand history's most powerful military coalition an epoch-defining defeat.

[Sidebar]

When The Empire Relied On Opium

By Sam Alexandroni

Britain has not always seen its mission as eliminating drug
trafficking: it was once a major player, pushing narcotics on foreign
markets through force of arms and raking in millions each year from
drug smuggling.

British merchants made huge sums running opium into China in the 19th
century by giving cash advances to farmers in rural India to
cultivate poppies. For Britain, it was the only way to balance the
books. Shipments of silk and tea bought from China had to be paid for
in silver bullion, because China did not want Britain's manufactured
goods. Opium was the only product in demand and by the 1830s Britain
was flooding the Chinese market with 1,400 tons of it each year.

The imperial capital in Peking was a long way from the main port of
Canton in the south. Corrupt Chinese officials, many of whom were
drug addicts, protected the smuggling operation in return for
kickbacks. Outraged, the Chinese emperor ignored the advice of some
mandarins to control opium through legalisation, and called for a
crackdown. Opium dens were closed, known dealers arrested and those
found guilty publicly executed. Foreign merchants were forced to
surrender their stocks of opium and the drug was dissolved and run
off into the ocean. In a few months during 1839, £3m worth of Crown
property was destroyed.

The British response was swift. In 1840, heavy gunships bombarded
coastal towns and captured Canton. Outgunned and humiliated, the
Chinese sued for peace, reluctantly accepting the 1842 Treaty of
Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to the British.

The peace was short-lived, and in 1856 a minor incident triggered the
second opium war. As one-sided as the first, it led to the Treaty of
Tientsin in 1858. Opium was legalised and, in the years that
followed, consumption soared, some estimates placing the rate of
addiction among the Chinese as high as 10 per cent.
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