The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 7 | Issue 20 | Number 3 | Article ID 3145 | May 17, 2009

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America's Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State

Peter Dale Scott

America’s Afghanistan: The NationalSecurity and a Heroin-RavagedState [Russian translation available(http://www.antidrugfront.ru/publications/01516.html).

Peter Dale Scott

For several years, informed observersindependent of the national securitybureaucracy have called for terminatingcurrent specific American policies and tacticsin Afghanistan– many reminiscent of the US inVietnam.

Informed observers decry the use of air strikesto decapitate the Taliban and al Qaeda, anapproach that has repeatedly resulted in thedeath of civilians. Many counsel against theinsertion of more and more US and otherforeign troops, as pursued first by the Bushadministration and then, even more vigorously,in the early days of the Obama administration,in an effort to secure the safety and allegianceof the population. And they regret the on-goinginterference in the fragile Afghan and Pakistanpolitical processes, in order to secure outcomesdesired in Washington.1 A New York Timesheadline, “In Pakistan, US Courts Leader ofOpposition,” was barely noticed in the U.S.mainstream media.

One root source of official myopia will not beaddressed soon – the conduct of crucialdecision-making in secrecy, not by those whoknow the area, but by those skilled enough inbureaucratic politics to have earned the highestsecurity clearances. It may nevertheless be

productive to criticize the mindset shared bythe decision-makers, and to point out elementsof the false consciousness which frames it, andwhich will require correction if the US is not towade deeper into its Afghan quagmire.

Why One Should Think of So-Called “FailedStates” as “Ravaged States”

I have in mind the bureaucratically convenientconcept of Afghanistan as a failed or failingstate. This epithet has been frequently appliedto Afghanistan since 9/11, 2001, and also toother areas where the United States is eager orat least contemplating intervention – such asSomalia, and the Congo. The conceptconveniently suggests that the problem is local,and requires outside assistance from othermore successful and benevolent states. In thisrespect, the term “failed state” stands in theplace of the now discredited term “undevelopedcountry,” with its similar implication that therewas a defect in any such country to beremedied by the “developed” western nations.

A Failed States Index

Most outside experts would agree that the

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states commonly looked on as “failed,” --notably Afghanistan, but also Somalia or theDemocratic Republic of the Congo – share adifferent feature. It is better to think of themnot as failed states but as ravaged states,ravaged primarily from the intrusions ofoutside powers. The policy implications ofrecognizing that a state has been ravaged arecomplex and ambiguous. Some might see pastabuses in such a state as an argument againstany outside involvement whatsoever. Othersmight see a duty for continued intervention, butonly by using different methods, in order tocompensate for the damage already inflicted.

The past ravaging of Somalia and the Congo(formerly Zaire) is now indisputable. These twoformer colonies were among the mostruthlessly exploited of any in Africa by theirEuropean invaders. In the course of thisexploitation, their social structures weresystematically uprooted and never replaced byanything viable. Thus they are best understoodas ravaged states, using the word “state” herein its most generic sense.

But the word “state” itself is problematic, whenapplied to the arbitrary divisions of Africaagreed on by European powers for their ownpurposes in the 19th century. Many of thestraight lines overriding the tribal entities ofAfrica and separating them into colonies wereestablished by European powers at a Berlinconference in 1884-85.2 Our loosest dictionarydefinition of “state” is “body politic,” implyingan organic coherence which most of theseentities have never possessed. The greatpowers played similar games in Asia, which arestill causing misery in areas like the Shanstates of Myanmar, or the tribes of West Papua.

Still less can African states be consideredmodern states as defined by Max Weber, whenhe wrote that the modern state “successfullyupholds a claim on the monopoly of thelegitimate use of violence [Gewaltmonopol] inthe enforcement of its order."3 The Congo in

particular has been so devoid of any statefeatures in its past history that it might bebetter to think of it as a ravaged area, not evenas a ravaged state.

The Historical Ravaging of Afghanistan

Afghanistan in contrast can be called a state,because of its past history as a kingdom, albeitone combining diverse peoples and languageson both sides of the forbidding Hindu Kush. Butalmost from the outset of that Durrani kingdomin the 18th century, Afghanistan too was a stateravaged by foreign interests. Even thoughtechnically Afghanistan was never a colony,Afghanistan’s rulers were alternatively proppedup and then deposed by Britain and Russia,who were competing for influence in an areathey agreed to recognize as a glacis or neutralarea between them.

Such social stability as there existed in theDurrani Afghan kingdom, a loose coalition oftribal leaders, was the product of tolerance andcircumspection, the opposite of a monopolisticimposition of central power. A symptom of thisdispersion of power was the inability of anyoneto build railways inside Afghanistan – one of themajor aspects of nation building in neighboringcountries.4

The British, fearing Russian influence inAfghanistan, persistently interfered with thisequilibrium of tolerance. This was notably thecase with the British foray of 1839, in whichtheir 12,000-man army was completelyannihilated except for one doctor. The Britishclaimed to be supporting the claim of oneDurrani family member, Shuja Shah, ananglophile whom they brought back from exilein India. With the disastrous British retreat in1842, Shuja Shah was assassinated.

The social fabric of Afghanistan, with a complextribal network, was badly disrupted by suchinterventions. Particularly after World War II,the Cold War widened the gap between Kabuland the countryside. Afghan cities moved

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towards a more western urban culture, assuccessive generations of bureaucrats weretrained elsewhere, many of them in Moscow.They thus became progressively more alienatedfrom the Afghan rural areas, which they weretrained to regard as reactionary, uncivilized,and outdated.

Meanwhile, especially after 1980, moderateSufi leaders in the countryside wereprogressively displaced in favor of radicaljihadist Islamist leaders, thanks to massivefunding from agents of the Pakistani ISI,dispersing funds that came in fact from SaudiArabia and the United States. Already in the1970s , a s o i l p ro f i t s s ky rocke ted ,representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood andthe Muslim World League, with Iranian and CIAsupport, “arrived on the Afghan scene withbulging bankrolls.”5 Thus the inevitable civilwar that ensued in 1978, and led to the Sovietinvasion of 1980, can be attributed chiefly toCold War forces outside Afghanistan itself.

Russian forces in Afghanistan

Afghanistan was torn apart by this foreign-inspired conflict in the 1980s. It is being tornapart again by the American military presencetoday. Although Americans were initially wellreceived by many Afghans when they firstarrived in 2001, the U.S. military campaign hasdriven more and more to support the Taliban.According to a February 2009 ABC poll, only 18

percent of Afghanis support more US troops intheir country.

Thus it is important to recognize thatAfghanistan is a state ravaged by externalforces, and not just think of it as a failing one.

The Foreign Origins of the ForcesRavaging Afghanistan Today: JihadiSalafist Islamism and Heroin

These external forces include the staggeringrise of both jihadi salafism and opiumproduction in Afghanistan, following theinterventions there two decades ago by theUnited States and the Soviet Union. Indispersing US and Saudi funds to the Afghanresistance, the ISI gave half of the funds itdispersed to two marginal fundamentalistgroups, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and AbdulRazul Sayyaf, which it knew it could control –precisely because they lacked popularsupport.6 The popularly based resistancegroups, organized on tribal lines, were hostileto this jihadi salafist influence: they were“repelled by fundamentalist demands for theabolition of the tribal structure as incompatiblewith [the salafist] conception of a centralizedIslamic state.7

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Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, with ISI and CIAprotection, began immediately to compensatefor his lack of popular support by developing aninternational traffic in opium and heroin, not onhis own, however, but with ISI and foreignassistance. After Pakistan banned opiumcultivation in February 1979 and Iran followedsuit in April, the Pashtun areas of Pakistan andAfghanistan ‘‘attracted Western drug cartelsand ‘scientists’ (including ‘some “fortune-seekers” from Europe and the US’) to establishheroin processing facilities in the tribal belt.8

Heroin labs had opened in the North-WestFrontier province by 1979 (a fact duly noted bythe Canadian Maclean’s Magazine of April 30,1979). According to Alfred McCoy, "By 1980Pakistan-Afghan opium dominated the

European market and supplied 60 percent ofAmerica’s illicit demand as well."9 McCoy alsorecords that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar controlled acomplex of six heroin laboratories in a region ofBaluchistan "where the ISI was in totalcontrol."10

The global epidemic of Afghan heroin, in otherwords, was not generated by Afghanistan, butwas inflicted on Afghanistan by outsideforces.11 It remains true today that although 90percent of the world’s heroin comes fromAfghanistan, the Afghan share of proceeds fromthe global heroin network, in dollar terms, isonly about ten percent of the whole.

Afghan opium

In 2007, Afghanistan supplied 93% of theworld's opium, according to the U.S. StateDepartment. Ill icit poppy production,m e a n w h i l e , b r i n g s $ 4 b i l l i o n i n t oAfghanistan,12 or more than half the country’stotal economy of $7.5 billion, according to theUnited Nations Office of Drug Control(UNODC).13 It also represents about half of theeconomy of Pakistan, and of the ISI inparticular.14

Destroying the labs has always been an obviousoption, but for years America refused to do sofor political reasons. In 2001 the Taliban andbin Laden were estimated by the CIA to beearning up to 10 per cent of Afghanistan’s drug

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revenues, then estimated at between 6.5 and10 billion U.S. dollars a year.15 This income ofperhaps $1 billion was less than that earned byPakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, parts ofwhich had become the key to the drug trade inCentral Asia. The UN Drug Control Program(UNDCP) estimated in 1999 that the ISI madearound $2.5 billion annually from the sale ofillegal drugs.16

At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001,according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon hada list of twenty-five or more drug labs andwarehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bombthem because some belonged to the CIA's newNA [Northern Alliance] allies.”17 Rashid was“told by UNODC officials that the Americansknew far more about the drug labs than theyclaimed to know, and the failure to bomb themwas a major setback to the counter-narcoticseffort."18

James Risen reports that the ongoing refusal topursue the targeted drug labs came fromneocons at the top of America’s nationalsecurity bureaucracy, including Douglas Feith,Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and theirpatron Donald Rumsfeld.19 These men wereperpetuating a pattern of drug-trafficprotection in Washington that dates back toWorld War Two.20

There were humanitarian as well as politicalreasons for tolerating the drug economy in2001. Without it that winter many Afghanswould have faced starvation. But the CIA hadmounted its coalition against the Taliban in2001 by recruiting and even importing drugtraffickers, many of them old assets from the1980s. An example was Haji Zaman who hadretired to Dijon in France, whom “British andAmerican officials…met with and persuaded …to return to Afghanistan.21

Thanks in large part to the CIA-backed anti-Soviet campaign of the 1980s, Afghanistantoday is a drug-corrupted or heroin-ravaged

society from top to bottom. On an internationalindex measuring corruption, Afghanistan ranksas #176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is180th). 22 Karzai returned from America to hisnative country vowing to fight drugs, yet todayit is recognized that his friends, family, andallies are deeply involved in the traffic.23

In 2005, for example, Drug EnforcementAdministration agents found more than ninetons of opium in the office of Sher MuhammadAkhundzada, the governor of HelmandProvince, and a close friend of Karzai who hadaccompanied him into Afghanistan in 2001 on amotorbike. The British successfully demandedthat he be removed from office.24 But the newsreport confirming that Akhunzada had beenremoved announced also that he had beensimultaneously given a seat in the Afghansenate.25

Former warlord and provincial governor GulAgha Sherzai, an American favorite whorecently endorsed Karzai’s re-electioncampaign, has also been linked to the drugstrade.26 In 2002 Gul Agha Sherzai was the go-between in an extraordinary deal between theAmericans and leading trafficker Haji BasharNoorzai, whereby the Americans agreed totolerate Noorzai’s drug-trafficking in exchangefor supplying intelligence on and arms of theTaliban.27

By 2004, according to House InternationalRelations Committee testimony, Noorzai wassmuggling two metric tons of heroin toPakistan every eight weeks.28 Noorzai wasfinally arrested in New York in 2005, havingcome to this country at the invitation of aprivate intelligence firm, Rosetta Research. TheU.S. media reports of his arrest did not pointout that Rosetta had failed to supply Noorzaithe kind of immunity usually provided by theCIA.29

(It will be interesting to see, for example,whether Noorzai will remain as free for as long

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as Venezuelan General Ramón Guillén Davila,chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit inVenezuela, who in 1996 received a sealedindictment in Miami for smuggling six yearsearlier, with CIA approval, a ton of cocaine intothe United States.30 But the United States never asked for Guillén’s extradition fromVenezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when hewas arrested in Venezuela for plotting toassassinate President Hugo Chavez, hisindictment was still sealed in Miami.31 According to the New York Times, "The CIA,over the objections of the Drug EnforcementAdministration, approved the shipment of atleast one ton of pure cocaine to MiamiInternational Airport as a way of gatheringinformation about the Colombian drugcartels."32 According to the Wall Street Journal,the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen.Guillén may have been more than 22 tons.33)

There are numerous such indications that thosegoverning Afghanistan are likely to becomeinvolved, willingly or unwillingly, in the drugtraffic. One can also probably anticipate that,with the passage of time, the Taliban will alsobecome increasingly involved in the drug trade,just as the FARC in Colombia and theCommunist Party in Myanmar have evolved intime from revolutionary movements into drug-trafficking organizations.

The situation in Pakistan is not much better.The U.S. mainstream media have nevermentioned the February 23 report in theLondon Sunday Times and that Asif Ali Zardari,now the Pakistani Prime Minister, was oncecaught in a DEA drug sting. An undercoverDEA informant, John Banks, told the SundayTimes that, posing as a member of the U.S.mafia, he had taped Zardari and two associatesfor five hours; Zardari discussed how he couldship hashish and heroin to the United States, ashe had done already to Great Britain. A retiredsenior British customs officer confirmed thatthe government had received reports ofZardari's alleged financing of the drug trade

from “about three or four sources.” Banks“claimed the subsequent investigation washalted after the CIA said it did not want todestabilise Pakistan.”

Important as heroin may have become to theAfghan and Pakistani political economies, thelocal proceeds are only a small share of theglobal heroin traffic. According to the UN, theultimate value in world markets in 2007 ofAfghanistan’s $4 billion opium crop was about$110 billion: this estimate is probably too high,but even if the ultimate value was as low as $40billion, this would mean that 90 percent of theprofit was earned by forces outside ofAfghanistan.34

It follows that there are many players with amuch larger financial stake in the Afghan drugtraffic than local Afghan drug lords, al-Qaeda,and the Taliban. Sibel Edmonds has chargedthat Pakistani and Turkish intelligence,working together, utilize the resources of theinternational networks transmitting Afghanheroin.35 In addition Edmonds “claims that theFBI was also gathering evidence against seniorPentagon officials - including household names- who were aiding foreign agents.”36 Two ofthese are said to be Richard Perle and DouglasFeith, former lobbyists for Turkey.37 DouglasRisen reports that, when Undersecretary ofDefense, Feith argued in a White Housemeeting “that counter-narcotics was not part ofthe war on terrorism, and so Defense wantedno part of it in Afghanistan.”38

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is aTurkish and ISI-backed Islamist drug route of alQaeda allies across North Central Asia,reaching from Tajikistan and Uzbekistanthrough Azerbaijan and Turkey to Kosovo.39

Dennis Dayle, a former top-level DEA agent inthe Middle East, has corroborated the CIAinterest in that region’s drug connection. I waspresent when he told an anti-drug conferencethat "In my 30-year history in the DrugEnforcement Administration and related

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agencies, the major targets of my investigationsalmost invariably turned out to be working forthe CIA."4

Above all, it has been estimated that 80 percentor more of the profits from the traffic arereaped in the countries of consumption. TheUNODC Executive Director, Antonio MariaCosta, has reported that “money made in illicitdrug trade has been used to keep banks afloatin the global financial crisis.”41

Expanded World Drug Production as aProduct of U.S. Interventions

The truth is that since World War II the CIA,without establishment opposition, has becomeaddicted to the use of assets who are drug-traffickers, and there is no reason to assumethat they have begun to break this addiction.The devastating consequences of CIA use andprotection of traffickers can be seen in thestatistics of drug production, which increaseswhere America intervenes, and also declineswhen American intervention ends.

Just as the indirect American intervention of1979 was followed by an unprecedentedincrease in Afghan opium production, so thepattern has repeated itself since the Americaninvasion of 2001. Opium poppy cultivation inhectares more than doubled, from a previoushigh of 91,000 in 1999 (reduced by the Talibanto 8,000 in 2001) to 165,000 in 2006 and193,000 in 2007. (Though 2008 saw a reducedplanting of 157,000 hectares, this was chieflyexplained by previous over-production, inexcess of what the world market could absorb.

No one should have been surprised by theseincreases: they merely repeated the dramaticincreases in every other drug-producing areawhere America has become militarily orpolitically involved. This was demonstratedover and over in the 1950s, in Burma (thanks toCIA intervention, from 40 tons in 1939 to 600tons in 1970),42 in Thailand (from 7 tons in1939 to 200 tons in 1968) and Laos (less than

15 tons in 1939 to 50 tons in 1973).43

The most dramatic case is that of Colombia,where the intervention of U.S. troops since thelate 1980s has been misleadingly justified as apart of a “war on drugs.” At a conference in1990 I predicted that this intervention wouldbe followed by an increase in drug production,not a reduction.44 But even I was surprised bythe size of the increase that ensued. Cocaproduction in Colombia tripled between 1991and 1999 (from 3.8 to 12.3 thousand hectares),while the cultivation of opium poppy increasedby a multiple of 5.6 (from .13 to .75 thousandhectares).45

There is no single explanation for this patternof drug increase. But it is essential that werecognize American intervention as integral tothe problem, rather than simply look to it as asolution.

It is accepted in Washington that Afghan drugproduction is a major source of all the problemsAmerica faces in Afghanistan today. RichardHolbrooke, now Obama’s special representativeto Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in a 2008Op-Ed that drugs are at the heart of America’sproblems in Afghanistan, and “breaking thenarco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or allelse will fail.”46 It is true that, as history hasshown, drugs sustain jihadi salafism, far moresurely than jihadi salafism sustains drugs.47

But at present America’s government andpolicies are contributing to the drug traffic, andnot likely to curtail it.

American Failure to Analyze the HeroinEpidemic

American policy-makers continue, however, topreserve the mindset of Afghanistan as a“failed state.” They persist in treating the drugtraffic as a local Afghan problem, not as aglobal, still less an American one. This is trueeven of Holbrooke, who more than most hasearned the reputation of a pragmatic realist on

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drug matters.

In his 2008 Op-Ed noting that “breaking thenarco-state in Afghanistan is essential,”Holbrooke admitted that this will not be easy,because of the pervasiveness of today’s drugtraffic, “whose dollar value equals about 50% ofthe country's official gross domestic product.”48

Holbrooke excoriated America’s existing drug-eradication strategies, particular aerialspraying of poppy fields: “The … program,which costs around $1 billion a year, may bethe single most ineffective policy in the historyof American foreign policy….It’s not just awaste of money. It actually strengthens theTaliban and al Qaeda, as well as criminalelements within Afghanistan.”

Holbrooke and Afghan leader Karzai

Not for a moment, however, did Holbrookeacknowledge any American responsibility forthe Afghan drug problem. Yet Holbrooke’s mainrecommendation was for “a temporarysuspension of eradication in insecure areas, aspart of an on-going campaign that “will takeyears, and … cannot be won as long as theborder areas in Pakistan are havens for theTaliban and al-Qaeda.”49 He did not proposeany alternative approach to the drug problem.

Washington’s perplexity about Afghan drugsbecame even more clear on March 27, 2009, at

a press briefing by Holbrooke the morning afterPresident Barack Obama unveiled his newAfghanistan policy.

Asked about the priority ofd r u g f i g h t i n g i n t h eA f g h a n i s t a n r e v i e w ,Holbrooke, as he was leavingthe briefing, said "We're goingto have to rethink the drugprob lem. . . a comple terethink." He noted that thepolicymakers who had workedon the Afghanistan review"didn't come to a firm, finalconclusion" on the opiumquestion. "It's just so damncomplicated," Holbrookee x p l a i n e d . " Y o u c a n ' te l i m i n a t e t h e w h o l eeradication program," heexclaimed. But that remarkdid make it seem that hebacked an easing up of somesort. "You have to put moreemphasis on the agriculturalsector," he added.50

A few days earlier Holbrooke had alreadyindicated that he would l ike to diverteradication funds into funds for alternativelivelihoods for farmers. But farmers are nottraffickers, and Holbrooke’s renewed emphasison them only confirms Washington’s reluctanceto go after the drug traffic itself.51

According to Holbrooke, the new Obamastrategy for Afghanistan would scale back theambitions of the Bush administration to turnthe country into a functioning democracy, andwould concentrate instead on security andcounter-terrorism.52 Obama himself stressedthat “we have a clear and focused goal: todisrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida inPakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent theirreturn to either country in the future.”53

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The U.S. response will involve a military, adiplomatic, and an economic developmentalcomponent. Moreover the military role willincrease, perhaps far more than has yet beenofficially indicated.54 Lawrence Korb, anObama adviser, has submitted a report whichcalls for "using all the elements of U.S. nationalpower -- diplomatic, economic and military -- ina sustained effort that could last as long asanother 10 years."55 On March 19, 2009, at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, Korb suggested that asuccessful campaign might require 100,000troops.56

This persistent search for a military solutionruns d i rec t l y coun te r t o the RANDCorporation’s recommendation in 2008 forcombating al-Qaeda. RAND reported thatmilitary force led to the end of terrorist groupsin only 7 percent of cases where it was used.And RAND concluded:

Minimize the use of U.S. militaryforce. In most operations against alQa'ida, local military forcesfrequently have more legitimacy too p e r a t e a n d a b e t t e runderstanding of the operatingenvironment than U.S. forces have.This means a light U.S. militaryfootprint or none at all.57

The same considerations extend to operationsagainst the Taliban. A recent study for theCarnegie Endowment concluded that "thepresence of foreign troops is the mostimportant element driving the resurgence ofthe Taliban."58 And as Ivan Eland of theIndependent Institute told the Orange CountyRegister, “"U.S. military activity in Afghanistanhas already contributed to a resurgence ofTaliban and other insurgent activity inPakistan.”59

But such elementary common sense is unlikelyto persuade RAND’s employers at the

Pentagon. To justify its global strategic postureof what it calls “full-spectrum dominance,” thePentagon badly needs the “war against terror”in Afghanistan, just as a decade ago it neededthe counter-productive “war against drugs” inColombia. To quote from the DefenseDepartment’s explanation of the JCS strategicdocument Joint Vision 2020, “Full-spectrumdominance means the ability of U.S. forces,operating alone or with allies, to defeat anyadversary and control any situation across therange of military operations.”60 But this is aphantasy: “full-spectrum dominance” can nomore control the situation in Afghanistan thanCanute could control the movement of thetides. America’s experience in Iraq, a terrainfar less favorable to guerrillas, should havemade this clear.

Full-spectrum dominance is of course not justan end in itself, it is also lobbied for by far-flung American corporations overseas,especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil withhuge investments in Kazakhstan and elsewherein Central Asia. As Michael Klare noted in hisbook Resource Wars, a secondary objective ofthe U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was "toconsolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf andCaspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flowof oil."61

The global drug traffic itself will continue tobenefit from the protracted conflict generatedby “full-spectrum dominance” in Afghanistan,and some of the beneficiaries may have beensecretly lobbying for it. And I fear that all theclient intelligence assets organized about themovement of Afghan heroin through CentralAsia and beyond will, without a clear change inpolicy, continue as before to be protected bythe CIA.

There will certainly continue to be targets forAmerica’s efforts at global dominance, as longas America continues to ravage states, in thename of rescuing them from “failing.” Anemerging new target is Pakistan, where the

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Obama administration plans to increase thenumber of Predator drone attacks, despite thesharp opposition of the Pakistan government.62 It is clear that these Predator strikes are amajor reason for the recent rapid growth of thePakistan Taliban, and why formerly peacefuldistricts like the Swat valley have now beenceded by the Pakistan military to control by theTaliban.63

Common sense will not produce unanimousrecommendations for what should happenwithin Afghanistan. Some observers are partialto the urban culture of Kabul, and particularlyto the campaign there to improve the statusand rights of women. Others are sympathetic tothe elaborate tribal system that ruled thecountryside for generations. Still others acceptthe modifications introduced by the Taliban asa needed social revolution. Finally there arethe security issues presented by the increasinginstability of neighboring Pakistan, a nuclearpower.

What common sense says clearly is that theAfghan crisis could be eased somewhat bychanges in the behavior of the United States. IfAmerica truly wishes a degree of social stabilityto return to that area, it would seem obviousthat, as a first step:

1) President Obama shouldrenounce JCS strategic documentJo int V is ion 2020, wi th i t spretentious and nonsensicalambition of using U.S. forces to“control any situation.”

2) The United States shouldconsider apologizing for pastravagings of the Muslim world, andspecifically its role in the 1953overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran, inthe 1953 assassination of Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq, and inassisting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar inthe 1980s to impose his murderous

and drug-trafficking presence inAfghanistan. Ideally it wouldapologize also for its recentmilitary violations of the Pakistaniborder, and renounce them.

3) President Obama shouldaccept the recommendation of theRAND Corpora t ion tha t inoperations against al-Qaeda, theU.S. should employ “a l ightmilitary footprint or none at all.”

4) President Obama should makeit clear that the CIA in future mustdesist from protecting drugtraffickers around the world whobecome targets of the DEA.

In short, President Obama should make it clearthat America no longer has ambitions toestablish military or covert control over aunipolar world, and that it wishes to return toits earlier posture in a multipolar worldcommunity.

It is common sense, in short, that America’sown interests would be best served bybecoming a pos t - imper ia l soc ie ty .Unfortunately it is not likely that commonsense will prevail against the special interestsof what has been called the “petroleum-military-complex,” along with others, includingdrug-traffickers, with a stake in America’scurrent military posture.

Vast bureaucratic systems, like that of theSoviet Union two decades ago, are like aircraftcarriers, notoriously difficult to shift into afresh direction. It would appear that those inAmerica’s national security bureaucracy, likethe bureaucrats of Great Britain a century ago,are still dedicated to squandering awayAmerica’s strength, in a futile effort to preservea corrupt and increasingly unstable regiment ofglobal power.

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Just as a by-product of European colonialism acentury ago was third-world communism, sothese American efforts, if not terminated orradically revised, may produce as by-productan ever widening spread of jihadi salafistterrorism, suicide bombers, and guerrillas.

In 1962 common sense extricated the Kennedyadministration from a potentially disastrousnuclear confrontation with Khrushchev in theCuban missile crisis. It would be nice to thinkthat America is capable of correcting its foreignpolicy by common sense again. But the absenceof debate about Afghanistan and Pakistan, inthe White House, in Congress, and in thecountry, is depressing.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomatand English Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oila n d W a r(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742525228/?tag=t h e a s i p a c j o 0 b - 2 0 ) ,(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258711/?tag=theas ipac jo0b-20)The Road to 9 /11(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258711/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), The War Conspiracy: JFK,9 /11 , and the Deep Po l i t i c s o f War(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0980121361/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20). His American War Machine:Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connectiona n d t h e R o a d t o A f g h a n i s t a n(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742555941/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) is in press, from Rowman &Littlefield.

His website, which contains a wealth of hisw r i t i n g s , i s h e r e(http://www.peterdalescott.net).

He wrote this article for The Asia-PacificJournal.

Recommended Citation: Peter Dale Scott,"America's Afghanistan: The National Securityand a Heroin-Ravaged State," The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol 20-3-09, May 17th, 2009.

Peter Dale Scott’s articles on relatedsubjects include:

Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and theA f g h a n a n d I r a q W a r s : l i n k(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3010)

Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History:link (https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/2784)

The government can easily provide resources toh e l p a d r u g a d d i c t(http://www.projectknow.com/research/how-to-help-an-addict-or-alcoholic/) the same way itallocates funds for its international campaignagainst drug trafficking.

Notes

[1] Five of the current candidates for Afghanpresident are U.S. ,S, citizens. The Independent(January 23, 2009) has reported thatWashington is searching for a “dream ticket” tooust the incumbent and former favorite, HamidKarzai, now condemned as corrupt. PressTVgoes farther: “Washington is using its politicalclout to influence the outcome of the upcomingpresidential elections in Afghanistan, a reportsays. The US embassy in Kabul has urgedAfghanistan's leading presidential hopefuls towithdraw from the race in favor of Ali AhmadJalali -- a candidate that is more preferred byWashington, reported Pakistan's Ummat daily.In return, US officials have promised toguarantee key positions for the threecandidates -- which include finance ministerAshraf Ghani, former foreign minister AbdullahAbdullah and political activist Anwar ul-HaqAhadi -- in the next Afghan government. Themove received instant condemnation asflagrant US interference in Afghan politics andinternal affairs. Jalali -- who is viewed as themain rival of President Hamed Karzai in theAugust presidential elections -- is a US citizenand former Afghan minister of the interior. Hiscandidacy is seen as a direct violation of the

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Chapter Three, Art ic le S ixty Two ofAfghanistan's Constitution, which states thatonly an Afghan citizen has the right to run forpresident - which means that Jalali would haveto apply for Afghan citizenship first. ZalmayKhalilzad and Ashraf Ghani, two othercandidates vying for presidency, also hold USc i t i z e n s h i p ” ( l i n k(http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=91334&sectionid=351020403)).[2] Jeffrey Ira Herbst, States and Power inAfrica (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 71; S.E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference,1884-1885 (London: Longmans , 1942), 177.[3] Max Weber, The Theory of Social andEconomic Organization (New York: Free Press,1964), 154.[4] Railways approach Afghanistan from thenorth, easy, south, and west. The only two withfoothold terminals in Afghanistan itself arethose built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s,from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.[5] Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Outof Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the SovietWithdrawal (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995), 16. Harrison heard about theprogram in 1975 from the Shah’s Ambassadorto the United Nations, “who pointed to itproudly as an example of Iranian-Americancooperation.”[6] See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, TheRoad to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Futureof America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 2007), 73-75,117-22.[7] Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan,163.[8] M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia:From the Opium Trade to the Present Day(New York: Palgrave, 2000), 188. According toa contemporary account, Americans andEuropeans star ted becoming involved in drugsmuggling out of Afghanistan from the early1970s; see Catherine Lamour and Michel R.Lamberti, The International Connection: Opiumfrom Growers to Pushers (New York: Pantheon,1974), 190 –92.

[9] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ ChicagoReview Press, 2001), 447.[10] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 458; MichaelGriffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The TalibanMovement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press,2001),148 (labs); Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia,189 (ISI).[11] Before 1979 little Afghan opium or heroinreached markets beyond Pakistan and Iran(McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 469-71).[12] USA Today, January 12, 2009.[ 1 3 ] N e w s w e e k(http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577), Apr 7,2008.[14] Cf. S. Hasan Asad, , “Shadow economy andPakistan's predicament,” Economic Review[Pakistan], April, 1994.[15] Financial Times, November 29, 2001.[16] Times of India, November 29, 1999.[17] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: TheUnited States and the Failure of NationBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and CentralAsia (New York: Viking, 2008), 320.[18] Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 427.[19] James Risen, State of War: The SecretHistory of the CIA and the Bush Administration(New York: Free Press, 2006), 154, 160-63.[20] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: TheUnited States in Afghanistan, Colombia, andIndochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2003).[21] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape:The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail(Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 9. On December4, 2001, Asia Times reported that a convictedP a k i s t a n i d r u g b a r o n a n d f o r m e rparliamentarian, Ayub Afridi, was also releasedfrom prison to participate in the U.S. invasiono f A f g h a n i s t a n ( l i n k(http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CL04Df01.html)); Scott, Road to 9/11, 125..[ 2 2 ] B e r n d D e b u s m a n n(http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/01/29/obama-and-the-afghan-narco-state), “Obamaand the Afghan Narco-state,” Reuters, January

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29th, 2009.[23] Guardian, April 7, 2006, Independent,April 13, 2006, San Francisco Chronicle, April17, 2006.[24] Independent (London), April 13, 2006;James Nathan, “Ending the Taliban's moneystream; U.S. should buy Afghanistan's opium,”Washington Times, January 8, 2009.[ 2 5 ] A f g h a n i s t a n N e w s(http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2005/december/dec232005.html), December23, 2005.[ 2 6 ] I n d e p e n d e n t(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/former-warlord-to-fight-karzai-in-afghanistan-polls-1640164.html#mainColumn), March 9,2009. When Obama visited Afghanistan in2008, Gul Agha Sherzai was the first Afghanleader he met. The London Observer reportedon July 21, 2002, that in order to secure hisacceptance of the new Karzai government, GulAgha Sherzai, along with other warlords, had“been 'bought off' with millions of dollars indeals brokered by US and British intelligence.”[ 2 7 ] M a r k C o r c o r a n(http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/blog_mark.htm),Australian Broadcasting Company, 2008. “In anaffidavit in his criminal case, he traced ahistory of cooperating with U.S. officials,including the CIA, dating to 1990. In early2002, fo l lowing the U.S. invasion ofAfghanistan, Noorzai said he turned over to theU.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons,including “four hundred anti-aircraft missiles ofRussian, American and British manufacture”(Tom Burghardt , “The Secret and (Very)Prof i table World of Intel l igence andNarcotrafficking,” DissidentVoice, January 2nd,2 0 0 9 , l i n k(http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/the-secret-and-very-profitable-world-of-intelligence-and-narcotrafficking/)). Cf. Risen, State of War,165-66.[28] USA Today, October 26, 2004.[ 2 9 ] W a s h i n g t o n P o s t(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122602099.html),

December 27, 2008; New York Sun, January 29,2 0 0 8 ,http://www.nysun.com/foreign/justice-dept-eyes-us-firms-payments-to-afghan/70371/..[30] New York Times, November 23, 1996; cf.November 20, 1993.[31] Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to KillVenezuela's Hugo Chávez?” Global Research,April 19, 2007.[32] New York Times, November 23, 1996.[33] Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1996.The information about the drug activities ofGuillen Davila and François had been publishedin the U.S. press years before the indictments.It is possible that, had it not been for thecontroversy aroused by Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine stories in the August 1996 San JoseMercury, these two men and their networksmight have been as untouchable as otherkingpins in the global CIA drug connectionwhom we shall discuss, such Miguel NassarHaro in Mexico.[ 3 4 ] W a s h i n g t o n P o s t(http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan_Opium_Survey_2008.pdf).[ 3 5 ] P h i l i p G i r a l d i(http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/jan/28/00012/) , “Found in Translation: FBIwhistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills hersecrets,” The American Conservative, January28, 2008. Others have written about the tiesbetween U.S. intelligence and the Turkishnarco-intelligence connection; see e.g. DanieleGanser, NATO's Secret Armies: OperationGladio and Terrorism in Western Europe(London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005. 224-41;Martin A. Lee, “Turkey's Drug-TerrorismConnection,”C o n s o r t i u m N e w s(http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/jan/28/00012/), January 25th, 2008.[ 3 6 ] L o n d o n S u n d a y T i m e s(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece), January 6,2008: “`If you made public all the informationthat the FBI have on this case, you will see veryhigh-level people going through criminal trials,’

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she said.”[ 3 7 ] H u f f i n g t o n P o s t(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/sibel-edmonds-speaks_b_80077.html),January 6, 2008.[38] Risen, State of War, 154.[39] Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated:Tracing the Dollars Behind the TerrorNetworks (New York: Seven Stories Press,2005), 90-97: “While the ISI trained Islamistinsurgents and supplied arms, Turkey, SaudiArabia, several Gulf states and the Talibanfunded them…Each month, an estimated 4-6metric tons of heroin are shipped from Turkeyvia the Balkans to Western Europe” (90, 96). [40] Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall,Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies inCentral America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1998), x-xi.[41 ] In te rna t i ona l Hera ld Tr ibune(http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2009/01/25/ e u r o p e / O U K W D - U K - F I N A N C I A L - U N -DRUGS.php), January 25, 2009. Cf. DailyTelegraph (London), January 26, 2009.[42] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 16, 191.[43] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 93, 431. Afterthe final American withdrawal in 1975, Laotianproduction continued to rise, thanks to theorganizational efforts of Khun Sa, a drugtrafficker whom Thailand was relying on asprotection against the Communists in Burmaand Vientiane. (McCoy, 428-31)[44] Peter Dale Scott, ‘‘Honduras, the ContraSupport Networks, and Cocaine: How the U.S.Government Has Augmented America’s DrugCrisis,’’ in Alfred W. McCoy and AlanA. Block, eds., War on Drugs: Studies in theFailure of U. S. Narcotic Policy (Boulder:Westview, 1992), 126 –27. I presented theseremarks at a University of Wisconsinconference.[45] International Narcotics Control StrategyR e p o r t(http://www.state.gov/www/global/narcotics_law/1999_narc_report), 1999. Released by theBureau for International Narcotics and LawEnforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State,

Washington, D.C., March 2000. Production hassince decreased, but is still well above 1990 levels.[ 4 6 ] R i c h a r d H o l b r o o k e(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202617.html),“Breaking the Narco-State.” Washington Post,January 23, 2008.[47] I use “jihadi salafism,” an admittedlyclumsy expression, in place of the morefrequently encountered “Islamism” or “Islamicfundamentalism” -- both of which terms conferupon jihadi salafism a sense of legitimacy andlong-time history which I do not believe itdeserves. The jihadi salafism I am talkingabout , with roots in Wahhabism andDeobandism, can be seen in part as a responseto British and American influence in India andthe Muslim world. Osama bin Laden points tothe earlier example of Imam Taki al-Din ibnTaymiyyah in the thirteenth century, but ibnTaymiyyah’s jihadism was in reaction to theMongol ravaging of Baghdad in 1258. As I havedemonstrated elsewhere, history abundantlyshows that “outside interventions are likely ifnot certain, in any culture, to produce reactionsthat are violent, xenophobic, and desirous ofreturning to a mythically pure past” (Scott,Road to 9/11, 260-61).[ 4 8 ] R i c h a r d H o l b r o o k e(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202617.html),“Breaking the Narco-State.” Washington Post,January 23, 2008.[49] Holbrooke, “Breaking the Narco-State.” [ 5 0 ] D a v i d C o r n(http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/03/holb r o o k e - c a l l s - c o m p l e t e - r e t h i n k - d r u g s -afghanistan), “Holbrooke Calls for "CompleteRethink" of Drugs in Afghanistan,” MotherJones Mojo.[51] “`By forced eradication we are oftenpushing farmers into the Taleban hands,’ MrHolbrooke said. `We are going to try toreprogramme that money. About $160 millionis for alternate livelihoods and we would like toincrease that’” (London Times, March 23, 2009,

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l i n k(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5955860.ece)).[ 5 2 ] G u a r d i a n(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/24/richard-holbrooke-taliban-afghanistan-hamid-karzai), March 24, 2009.[ 5 3 ] N e w s H o u r(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june09/afghanpak_03-27.html), PBS, March 27,2009. Cf . Christ ian Science Monitor(http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/03/27/obamas-strategy-for-afghanistan-and-pakistan/), March 27, 2009.[54] “Obama's [May] 2009 [supplementary] warbudget sheds light on the expansion of the warin Afghanistan and Pakistan. …The Departmentof Defense states that funding for theAfghanistan War will increase to $46.9 billionin 2009, a 31 percent rise over the $35.9 billionin 2008 and the $32.6 billion in 2007…. This$11.3 billion increase includes an additional$2.8 billion for the Afghanistan Security ForcesFund, $400 mi l l ion for the Pakis tanCounterinsurgency Capability Fund and $4.4bil l ion for MRAPs designed for use inAfghanistan. Increased troop levels will alsoaccount for a portion of the increase” (JeffLeys, “Analyzing Obama's War BudgetNumbers,” Truthout, May 4, 2009, link(http://www.truthout.org/050409R?n)).[55] “Further Military Commitment inAfghanistan May Be Toughest Sell Yet(http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/03/25/military-commitment-afghanistan-toughest-sell/),” Fox News, March 25, 2009. Ina little-noted speech on October 17, 2008,Holbrooke also predicted that the war inAfghanistan would become “the longest inAmerican history,” surpassing even Vietnam

( N Y U S c h o o l o f L a w N e w s , l i n k(http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/HOLBROOKE_SPEECH)).[ 5 6 ] T h e E n d R u n(http://www.theendrun.com/2009/former-obama-advisor-and-cfr-vp-says-100000-troops-needed/), April 6, 2009.[ 5 7 ] R A N D C o r p o r a t i o n(http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html), “How Terrorist Groups End:Implications for Countering al Qa'ida,”Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008).[ 5 8 ] G i l l e s D o r r o n s o r o(http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf), “Focus and Exit: an AlternativeStrategy for the Afghan War,” CarnegieEndowment for International Peace, January2009.[ 5 9 ] O r a n g e C o u n t y R e g i s t e r(http://www.ocregister.com/articles/afghanistan-military-qaida-2348209-president-operations),March 30, 2009.[60] “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-s p e c t r u m D o m i n a n c e(http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289),” DefenseLink, emphasis added.[ 6 1 ] M i c h a e l T . K l a r e(http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2006/04/19/01181.html). Resource Wars:The New Landscape of Global Conflict (HenryHolt, New York 2001; quoted in David MichaelSmith, “The U.S. War in Afghanistan,” TheCanadian, April 19, 2006. Cf. Scott, Road to9/11, 169-70.[ 6 2 ] C h r i s t i a n S c i e n c e M o n i t o r(http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0408/p99s01-duts.html), April 8, 2009.[ 6 3 ] C f . “ H o l b r o o k e o f S o u t h A s i a(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123940326797109645.html),” Wall Street Journal, April 11,2009.

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