DRUG MADNESS

U.S. War On Drugs Is A Disaster - Now It's Being Exported To Afghanistan

Last Wednesday, a feature story in the New York Times began with an
unusual scene. In a compound outside Kabul, a group of raw Afghan
recruits was being instructed in the basics of enforcing drug laws.
"It's Narcotics 101," one of the instructors, a U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration agent, told the reporter. "We are at a stage now of
telling these recruits, 'this is a handgun, this is a bullet.' "

That's not unusual. The DEA operates all over the world. What was
unusual were the companions the DEA had brought along to help teach
Narcotics 101 to the Afghans. Holding mock AK-47s were two officers
of the counternarcotics police of Colombia. "I wanted the Colombians
to come here to give the Afghans something to aspire to," the DEA man
said. "To instill the fact that they have been doing this for years,
and it has worked."

I relate this anecdote not to mock the DEA's delusions - so easy as
to be unsporting - but to warn Canadian soldiers that the bad
situation in which they find themselves is going to get worse.

According to the Times, the Americans have had a shift in thinking
about Afghanistan. "Administration officials say they had believed
they could eliminate the insurgency first, then tackle the drug
trade," the Times reported. But no more. Now the Americans feel the
weakening grip of the central government is largely the result of the
flourishing drug trade, and so opium has to be a primary target in
the fight for control of country. And that means doing in Afghanistan
what is being done in Colombia.

Ask that DEA man in Kabul what's happening in Colombia and he'll
rattle off the good news of the past couple of years. Leftist
guerrillas have weakened, right-wing paramilitaries have
decommissioned and central government control has strengthened. There
have been huge seizures of drugs. The number of acres planted with
coca bushes - the source of cocaine - has declined modestly, while
there has been a major drop in the opium poppy crops that are the
source of heroin.

The U.S. tactics have basically three components: First, interdict
drug shipments outside the country. Second, ramp up militarized
policing within the country. Third, deploy an air force of crop
dusters to spray immense quantities of herbicides on drug crops.

It takes billions and billions of dollars to pay for all this, of
course, and in Colombia the U.S. covered only part of that bill. Most
of the rest is shouldered by Colombians - who are too poor to provide
basic education and health care to much of the population.

Leaving aside the question of whether those billions could have done
more good spent on something other than trying to stop Americans from
getting high, there are more obvious reasons to question whether the
Colombian war on drugs should be seen as anything but a humanitarian disaster.

There's history, for one. The tactics said to be doing such good in
Colombia today weren't introduced recently. They've been standard
operating procedure ever since the first President George Bush
launched what was called "the Andean Initiative" almost two decades
ago. That program featured gobs of money for interdiction,
militarized policing and aerial eradication.

President Bill Clinton spent more money on a program with a different
name and the same tactics. Then the second President George Bush
launched what was imaginatively called "the Andean Counterdrug
Initiative." It featured - wait for it - gobs of money for
interdiction, militarized policing and aerial eradication.

Throughout almost this entire time, drug production and trafficking
soared. Guerrillas and paramilitaries flourished. Colombia's refugee
camps swelled. Only in the past couple of years have there been some
very modest reversals of these trends.

Does this prove the American tactics work? Imagine a doctor who gives
a sick patient untested medicine and the patient got sicker. So he
gives the patient a bigger dose of the same medicine and the patient
gets sicker. And the doctor keeps this up for years until, one day,
the patient got marginally less sick and the doctor exults that he's
found the cure. Would this experience prove the medicine works? Or
that the doctor is an irresponsible quack?

America's drug warriors have remarkably poor memories. In the early
1980s, Colombia wasn't a major producer of cocaine, and opium poppy
was scarcely grown. Bolivia and Peru were the big source countries.
So the Americans squeezed using the usual tactics. Production
plummeted. And the gringos declared it a resounding success.

It was, in fact, a tragedy. Production rose even more rapidly in
Colombia than it fell in Peru and Bolivia. As any economist could
have predicted - and some did - the U.S.-led effort only succeeded in
pushing the plague over the border into a country too weak to defend itself.

It is really quite dazzling to now hear U.S. officials boasting about
modest improvements in Colombia's hellish conditions when those
conditions are largely the product of U.S. policies.

Efforts to cut smuggling routes have been even more inconsequential.
As quickly as routes are severed, new routes are created. All this
succeeds in doing is spreading corruption and violence around whole regions.

Thus, the recent "successes" in Colombia have turned Venezuela into a
major new shipment point. Guatemala and Haiti are also increasingly
popular stepping stones for smugglers. And pressure in the Caribbean
has prompted Colombian traffickers to construct a pipeline to Europe
through Ghana, Africa's fragile success story.

And then there's the biggest trans-shipment country, Mexico. A major
crackdown a couple of years ago left all the major drug lords dead or
in prison. The DEA called that a great victory, too. But that victory
unleashed virtual civil war as traffickers battled for control. This
week, Mexico's chief drug intelligence officer was shot dead; he had
been on the job for one month.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai knows if the tactics used in Colombia
were deployed in Afghanistan, small farmers who rely on opium poppy
to feed their children would throw their support to the Taliban and
his government would be in grave danger. This is why he has resisted
"Colombianization" from the moment he entered office.

But if the Americans were to insist, Afghanistan's government would
have no more choice in the matter than Colombia's. And Canadian
soldiers would discover that tough as things are now, they can get a
hell of a lot worse.