Pubdate: Thu, 20 Jan 2005
Source: Athens News, The (OH)
Copyright: 2005 Athens News
Contact:  http://www.athensnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1603
Author: Bill Weinberg
Cited: Ashraf Ghani's OPED http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v04/n000/a385.html

JOURNALIST'S DEATH DREDGES UP DARK LEGACY OF CIA'S DRUG-FUELED WARS

On Jan. 6, a soldier from Afghanistan's nascent national army was
killed, along with two assailants, when troops were sent in to
eradicate an opium field in Uruzgan province. The central government
of President Hamid Karzai recognizes that these could prove the
opening shots of a new opium war. A month earlier, on Dec. 11,
Karzai's finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, published an op-ed piece in
The New York Times, "Where Democracy's Greatest Enemy Is a Flower,"
pleading for international support for crop-substitution programs.
Opium is the key to power for Afghanistan's warlords, who still
control much of the country.

It would be impolitic for Karzai's government to remind his U.S.
underwriters of Washington's own complicity in creating this reality.
The apparent December suicide of Gary Webb, the journalist responsible
for the "Dark Alliance" sensation in the San Jose Mercury News in
1996, sparked at least a brief media recollection of the
contra-cocaine claims of the Reagan era. That a CIA-backed rebel army
was also turning to the drug trade at that same time in Afghanistan
seems almost entirely forgotten.

Webb's controversial series documented the links between the
CIA-spawned "contra" guerrilla army in Nicaragua and a top California
cocaine ring. The series provoked a campaign to discredit it by major
media, which relentlessly trumpeted its real flaws. But whatever
Webb's failings, the Nicaraguan counter-revolution was a major player
in the 1980s coke boom. In 1989, the congress of Nicaragua's neighbor,
Costa Rica, permanently barred Lt. Col. Oliver North, ex-National
Security Adviser John Poindexter, the U.S. ambassador and CIA station
chief, from the country's territory, finding that their contra
re-supply operation had doubled as a cocaine ring. Such disturbing
realities were forgotten as Webb's work was dismissed as "conspiracy
theory."

Even more forgotten is that the contra-coke connection was mirrored in
an Afghan mujahedeen-heroin connection. Just as the CIA groomed an
army of right-wing exiles to destabilize revolutionary Nicaragua, the
agency turned to Islamic insurgents to drive Soviet troops from
Afghanistan. Once again, the CIA proxy army turned to the drug trade
to boost its war chest. And while Nicaragua has seen some
reconciliation since the 1980s, Afghanistan is still violently divided
- -- and under U.S. occupation.

Moreover, the contra war was small potatoes compared to the Afghan
campaign, which never received nearly as much media exposure. All
told, the CIA sunk some $450 million into the contras, compared with
over $2 billion for mujahedeen.

In a 1988 series for the Philadelphia Inquirer, "The CIA's Leaking
Pipeline," Tim Weiner found that weapons for the Afghan resistance
were being diverted to the armies of opium lords. The CIA admitted one
of every five dollars in war material bound for the mujahedeen
"disappeared." It was during the mujahedeen war that the
Afghan-Pakistan "Golden Crescent" overtook Southeast Asia's "Golden
Triangle" as the top source of global heroin.

This didn't slow down the Reagan administration. Following a 1986 bid
by CIA director William Casey, Congress approved Pentagon advisers and
hundreds of Stinger missiles for the mujahedeen.

Support for the mujahedeen led directly to the emergence of Al Qaeda.
In 1984, Osama bin Laden arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistan border city
then serving as the mujahedeen's staging area and trans-shipment point
for their heroin. It was there he established his Maktab al-Khidmat
("services center"), or MAK, a clearinghouse for mujahedeen volunteers
from the Arab world, where they were armed, indoctrinated and
dispatched to the front. CIA money flowed into the MAK through
Pakistan's secret service. Osama assumed command of the MAK in 1989,
the same year the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. He quickly
transformed the MAK into his Al Qaeda network of trained terrorists.

Given the extreme Islamic fundamentalist ideology of the mujahedeen,
it was only logical that they would turn their guns on their erstwhile
American underwriters after the Russians were driven out. When the
Taliban took power in 1996, pledging to restore order after years of
war, Afghanistan became a staging ground for global terrorist
operations -- culminating in 9-11 and the U.S.-led occupation that
continues today.

Now "liberated," Afghanistan has become again the world's top heroin
producer, supplying an estimated 90 percent of the global market,
according to the United Nations, which monitors world production via
satellite. Opium cultivation has, in fact, skyrocketed since the fall
of the puritanical Taliban, which had effectively, if briefly,
suppressed the trade. Growers have repeatedly opened fire on
government workers sent to eradicate their fields. Any effort by
President Karzai to challenge the opium economy could antagonize the
warlords and plunge the country back into civil war, making Bush's
victory in this ravaged land a Pyrrhic one.

America will be dealing with the legacy of Afghanistan's Dark Alliance
for years to come. It is sad that Gary Webb's passing has prompted
more dismissive condescension than serious grappling.

Editor's note: PNS contributor Bill Weinberg is editor of World War 4
Report (WW4Report.com). He is working on a book about Colombia for
Verso Books. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake