Pubdate: Thu, 04 Dec 2003
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2003 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Isabel Hilton

JUST POPPYCOCK

In Afghanistan And Colombia, America's Allies In The War On Terror Should 
Be Its Enemies In The War On Drugs

In early November 2001, as the war in Afghanistan was getting under way, 
the United Nations held a press conference in Islamabad to announce the 
latest scores in the global drug eradication effort. Those journalists who 
bothered to attend were surprised to learn that the previous year the 
Taliban had all but eradicated the opium poppy from the areas it 
controlled. At the time, it was the crimes of the Taliban regime - from its 
treatment of women and its love for Osama bin Laden to its promotion of 
heroin addiction among western youth - that were of interest. To discover 
that the Taliban had eradicated the opium poppy did not fit the picture of 
unhallowed evil that the moment demanded. The story made little impact. 
Even if it was true - as it undoubtedly was - there was a feeling that the 
Taliban did not really mean it: they probably had their fingers crossed. 
Praise was politically impossible.

Besides, if the story had been given more play it might have been noticed 
that in those parts of Afghanistan controlled by the Northern Alliance - 
who had successfully auditioned for the parts of noble heroes in the 
melodrama of the war against evil - opium production had risen sharply. Had 
too much attention been paid to that, it might have raised the question of 
what would happen if our new friends, the warlords, had the whole country 
in which to plant their favourite crop.

We know the answer to that now. After the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan 
swiftly recovered its position as producer of two-thirds of the world's 
heroin and main supplier to Europe, including the UK.

Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has banned it of course, but 
the gesture is futile. If the latest UN estimates are correct, opium brings 
in twice as much to Afghanistan as foreign aid does. (That's after the 
country became a priority case for assistance - or rather for promises of 
assistance.)

Opium revenues are equivalent to half of the country's GDP. Its 
agriculture, roads, communications and irrigation systems are in such bad 
shape that many farmers see little alternative to the poppy. And whatever 
Hamid Karzai says, the warlords are hardly going to suppress a crop that 
offers them such quantities of easy money.

The trouble is, what are they doing with the money? They are doing what 
warlords do: consolidating their power, buying arms, making sure that the 
central government doesn't get above itself.

Belatedly, though, the US seems to be worried that the wrong people might 
be getting hold of the revenues. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has 
launched an urgent initiative - Operation Containment - which is supposed 
to get the traffic under control. The reason for the belated concern is the 
fear that it is funding the wrong warriors - the resurgent jihadis and the 
Taliban. From war against terror to war against drugs, we appear to have 
come full circle.

To wage an effective war against drugs, however, the US will have to 
confront some of its major allies in the war against terror, and that is 
unlikely to happen. It complicates the narrative of good and evil for one 
thing. As the administration well knows, the words war and drugs are 
closely related, but not always in the way we like to pretend. The 
pompously titled "war on drugs" - a meaningless umbrella term that covers a 
variety of policies - has been a resounding failure by most rational 
measurements. But the close association between drugs and war is as strong 
as ever.

The drug business can be both a motive for armed conflict and a means of 
sustaining it. A cursory glance at the history of Afghanistan - and of 
conflicts elsewhere - reveals it is not just the guys in the black hats who 
have found it useful. Afghanistan's drug trade took off in the 1980s, when 
the CIA was sponsoring the mojahedin war against the USSR. The cocaine 
trade in Central America flourished when the US administration was backing 
the Contras to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Clandestine flights that 
took arms to Central America returned with other illegal cargos. It helped 
the wheels of the war go round.

It helps the wheels go round in Colombia too. The writer Robin Kirk 
estimates that the New York street price of a kilogram of cocaine pays the 
wages of 250 Colombian fighters for a month, or buys 180 AK-47 rifles, or 
120 satellite telephones. And given that some 6 million Americans spend at 
least $46bn on cocaine and heroin a year - most of it from Colombia - 
there's plenty of life in the war yet.

The US government is pouring money into the civil war in Colombia on the 
pretext of fighting drugs. In this rather simple scenario, the rebels - the 
Farc and the ELN - are "narco-terrorists" and the Colombian army must be 
helped to defeat them. But the army is closely allied to paramilitary 
forces who are paid, fed, clothed and armed by drug money, and the 
Colombian legislature is full of senators and congressmen whose electoral 
campaign expenses were funded by drug money. If defeating the Farc and the 
ELN resulted in the end of the Colombian drugs business, the age of 
miracles would truly be upon us.
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