NARCOWAR'S TERROR NEXUS

The international war on drugs is the redheaded stepchild in the
war-on-terror family. So far, while a vital factor in terrorist efforts at
boosting bank balances - funding bloody campaigns the world over - it has
received little attention from the Bush administration.

This is somewhat puzzling.

As David T. Courtwright explains in "Forces of Habit," "Mao's dictum, that
all power flows from the barrel of a gun, presupposes the means to buy the
gun and to pay the soldier who wields it. Trafficking flourishes wherever
private armies, endemic conflict, proxy warfare and weak states are found."

Slinging dope, in other words, is terrorism's bread and butter.

Recognizing this, Bob Novak protests the sidelining of the drug war in his
Dec. 10 column, "Ignoring narco-terrorism" by pointing out that, in roundly
denouncing terror, President Bush has "mentioned narcotics hardly at all.
Not once in his daily rhetoric over those three months has the president
used the phrase 'narcoterrorism.'"

Further, says Novak, the DEA has not been given a voice in the government's
interagency, anti-terror choir - he laments it as the outeragency so far.

Still, the Bush administration's mum's-the-word approach is also somewhat
relieving, since I doubt the Bush response to narcowar would be the correct
one. Novak's concern - "What is lost by [Bush's] silence is the leverage of
the presidential bully pulpit to fight drugs" - is the surest tip-off that
the response desired from Bush is not the right one. To further crack down
on narcotics won't defund the terrorists - in fact, it shows a brazen
ignorance of black-market "narconomics."

Given the sums needed, these days the only thing more difficult than
raising money for terrorist enterprise is cooking-up start-up cash for
fledgling dot-com companies.

"State-sponsors are increasingly difficult to find," said Raphael Perl,
narcoterrorism expert for the Congressional Research Service, quoted in
Novak's column. "What world leader in his right mind will risk global
sanctions by openly sponsoring al-Qaida or funding it?"

So what's a cash-strapped terrorist to do?

Thanks to the amazingly inflated prices that global narcotics prohibition
cause, whoring after state sponsors isn't needed. Because of the
black-market profits, growing or marketing dope opens insurgents and
terrorists to astronomical amounts of moolah.

"Heroin has become a terrorist currency," says opium historian Martin
Booth, "and this is especially in the purchase of arms." Rebels in South
America have used cocaine for the same purposes, and it's natural that
terrorists and ne'er-do-wells would excel in this market.

Since growing opium poppies and coca bushes is illegal worldwide (except
for a few licensed pharmaceutical operations), people with a desire that
trumps the law - and have the comparative advantage in violence needed to
combat the law - step in to oversee and benefit from the illicit crop. It's
a natural fit for terrorists and insurgents; for people seeking to upset
the existing order either where they live or abroad, using the drug trade
to bring in the money necessary to fund their unlawful activities is just
good business.

And with that much money as incentive, getting them to stop isn't easy.

Focusing on the immediate war-on-terror connection, some simplistically say
the Afghani poppy fields should be obliterated, and while eradication will
have some effect, it will not ultimately solve the larger problem because
the demand for opium remains. The same is true for cocaine and cannabis.

As long as the market exists, growers in other regions will simply pick up
the slack. It is the incessant demand for drugs, not only from the West,
but also from the East (China's drug problem has ballooned in recent years)
that keeps the growers and others in the trade profiting from the drug.
When a Burmese farmer can grow yams or opium, the astronomical price
fetched by the poppies is a far better incentive than the nutrition of the
sweet potato.

And lest we be duped into believing that we somehow keep a very fertile and
vast earth in check with some "Round-Up," the notion of controlling
mega-cash crops like opium and coca with troops is beyond absurd.

Because of these factors, the international war on drugs has become the
economic force responsible for funding the very people the U.S. is
targeting in the war on terrorism - and possibly others waiting in the
wings. Remember that the U.S. Mafia built its fortune and infrastructure on
the backs of bootleggers during alcohol prohibition - international
narcotraffickers are now following the same profitable pattern.

Only by destroying the fantastic profits associated with the drug trade -
and given the economic factors involved, that effectively means
decriminalizing it - will the profit generator of terrorists be diminished
or removed, preventing its use in the future as a way to finance the
destruction of innocents.