TALES OF THE AFGHAN DRUG TRADE OPIUM FOR THE MASSES

During the last few weeks of anthrax hysteria, a dozen or so U.S. reporters
have pursued a more difficult, taboo story: opium's role as the centerpiece
of Afghanistan's economy. That cursed country was already a place where
children helped to harvest the gum from the poppies, working people kept
opium in their homes rather than money in the bank, and the Taliban raked
in up to $50 million a year in drug taxes. But post-September 11, Taliban
leaders lifted a ban on their bestselling crop, and the growers and dealers
have been conducting business as usual. On the tail of smart pieces in the
Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, The New York Times
ran a solid version of the story on October 22.

The best of these stories note that the careening wartime economy has
spurred Afghan civilians to re-embrace the drug trade. Farmers are tilling
the fields to prepare for the winter crop, chemists are setting up labs in
caves and the backs of trucks, and family men are risking their freedom to
sneak heroin across the border. As the Taliban dumps an estimated 4000 tons
of stockpiled opium on the world market, the Northern Alliance continues to
export a hefty share through Tajikistan into Russia and beyond. Experts
fear that, in the absence of "nation-building" efforts, the trade will
flourish long after the U.S. installs a new government in Kabul.

The rising tide of Afghan opium, heroin, and hashish is a potential
disaster. But as the Times' Tim Golden pointed out, the U.S. has long
neglected the drug war in that region. Last week, a DEA spokesperson told
the Voice that his agency has no access to Afghanistan. Asked about
published reports that the U.S. military intends to target stockpiles,
heroin labs, and poppy fields in Afghanistan, a Pentagon spokesperson
called the reports "pure speculation."

"Our quarrel is with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the terrorists and the
governments that support them," said the Pentagon source. "The drug
trafficking business has been a problem in Afghanistan for a while, and
it's an issue that the new government will have to address with the
international community." The Times paints the drug scene in Afghanistan as
a casualty of U.S. neglect, but it's also possible our government has
decided that an uncontrolled drug trade is an acceptable form of collateral
damage in this particular war. If so, it won't be the first time. During
the 1980s, when the U.S. paid the mujahideen guerrillas to fight the Soviet
invasion, the CIA famously turned a blind eye to the drug trade, and within
a few short years, Afghanistan came out of nowhere to become the world's
second-largest opium grower, after Myanmar. While most of the heroin sold
in the U.S. now arrives from Colombia and Mexico, during the 1980s Pakistan
and Afghanistan supplied more than half the U.S. market.

On October 7, the Los Angeles Times published a front-pager that suggested
a direct causal relationship between war and the drug trade. Reporting from
Islamabad, the Times' John Daniszewski noted that "drugs thrive in a war
culture, because warlords need the money from such illicit sales to buy
weapons, and growers and smugglers need an environment of lawlessness to
operate without fear of the police." Without implicating the U.S.,
Daniszewski also reported that the Soviet invasion in 1979 led to "a
two-decade drug bonanza" that gave the Taliban the resources to take over
Afghanistan.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune on September 30, Islamabad-based Tom
Hundley probed a little deeper, noting that during the 1980s, CIA director
William Casey embraced the opium trade as a means to finance his covert war
in Afghanistan. Translation: The Afghan fundamentalists may be drug lords,
but they're our drug lords. They learned to trade drugs for arms 20 years
ago, with the tacit approval of the CIA.

In the past few weeks, the Afghan drug trade has received energetic
coverage, often from the front, by The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Wall
Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, USA Today, and the
Chicago Tribune. But the New York Times coverage this month has been
spotty—the paper ran a color photo of opium smokers in the desert on
October 7, and on October 4, Barry Meier filed a curious report alleging
that Osama bin Laden had tried to produce a "super-heroin" to be marketed
in Europe and the U.S. (The Independent called the claim "sensational
though thinly substantiated.")

Grisly details about the U.S. role as a catalyst in the Afghan drug trade
can be found in the 1991 revised edition of Alfred McCoy's The Politics of
Heroin and in Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism
in Central Asia. According to McCoy, the relationship between covert ops
and the Afghan drug trade began when the CIA chose Pashtun hero Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, Hekmatyar
received $1 billion in covert U.S. funds.

With the help of Pakistani intelligence, the CIA smuggled arms across the
Pakistani border to Afghan guerrillas, using donkeys, camels, and trucks.
After the arms were unloaded, the same convoys shipped the drugs out, and
Hekmatyar became a major trafficker overnight. Opium grown in Afghanistan
was processed in Pakistani labs by Hekmatyar associates, and certain
corrupt Pakistani officers transported the drugs "under their own
bayonets," according to one source.

Hekmatyar and the CIA denied any involvement in the drug trade, and the
U.S. media held the story until the Cold War ended. Finally, in 1990, The
Washington Post published a front-page expose of Hekmatyar and his U.S.
protectors that should be required reading for every journalist covering
Afghanistan. (These days, Hekmatyar lives in exile in Iran, and Pakistan
gets high marks in the drug war.)

Some final facts to consider: The Taliban have at least 40 opium warehouses
in Afghanistan, as well as stockpiles in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and
elsewhere. U.S. sources have said they will try to find the stockpiles
using satellite imagery, and the Pentagon recently moved to buy the rights
to every photo it commissions from a commercial satellite
company--effectively preventing the war photos from ever becoming public.
Does the U.S. have a secret plan to seize raw opium as war booty? A DEA
spokesperson told the Voice last week that "a lot" of the Taliban
stockpiles had already been "seized," a report the Pentagon would not
confirm or deny. On the contrary, Golden's sources said the U.S. has "scant
information" about the location of the stockpiles.

Make no mistake--raw opium is a valuable commodity. Just ask the late U.S.
drug czar Harry Anslinger. During World War II, Anslinger quietly built his
own opium stockpile to assuage the fears of the pharmaceutical industry. At
the time, the U.S. bought most of its legal opium from Yugoslavia and
Turkey. But as Anslinger assured the industry in 1941, there was always
"high-grade" and "abundant" opium to be had from Afghanistan. Sixty years
later, there still is.