Search this site powered by FreeFind

Quick Link

for your convenience!

Human Rights, Youth Voices etc.

click here


 

For Information Concerning the Crisis in Darfur

click here


 

Northern Uganda Crisis

click here


 

 Whistleblowers Need Protection

 


The poppy problem keeps growing

A lot more Canadians are likely to die from Afghan heroin than to perish on Afghan soil
By Michael Byers, Vancouver Sun
July 11, 2009

SEEDS OF TERROR: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda

By Gretchen Peters

St. Martin's Press/ H.B. Fenn, 300 pages ($32.95)

- - -

Last November, I met a beautiful and cheerful young woman who was literally bursting with song. She was high on heroin, arms bruised from needle punctures, and so terribly thin that her pyjamas flapped as she danced through the vomit- and urine-stained halls of one of Vancouver's cheapest hotels.

By now, the young woman is probably dead -- one of the latest Canadian victims not just of the war on drugs, but also of the war in Afghanistan.

Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror is essential reading for anyone concerned about public policy in the drug, defence or diplomatic domains. The former ABC News reporter draws on decades of field experience, numerous interviews and secret government documents to demonstrate that opium -- not religious or political ideology -- poses the greatest challenge to the United States and NATO in Afghanistan today.

She traces the origins of the crisis to the United States' unqualified support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s. Focused on winning a proxy war against the Soviet Union, policymakers looked the other way as their local allies began to refine opium into heroin and smuggle it to Europe and North America.

A decade later, after the mujahedeen had morphed into the Taliban and taken power in Kabul, they continued to rely on heroin as a major source of income.

It might have been possible to close down the drug labs and smuggling routes during the first year or two of the U.S.-led occupation. But the Bush administration instead shifted its attention to Iraq, leaving only 10,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2002.

As Peters explains, this forced NATO commanders, short of boots on the ground, "to rely on aerial bombardments, killing hundreds of civilians and hardening the Afghan villagers against the West."

The mission was further compromised by a narrow focus on capturing or killing the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership. In late 2001, U.S. troops detained Haji Juma Khan, whom they knew to be a drug smuggler with ties to the Taliban. But when they realized that he couldn't lead them to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, they let him go.

Over the next seven years, Khan moved some $7 billion worth of opium to international markets.

According to Peters, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was concerned that Afghanistan "could turn into another costly drug war like Colombia" and rejected any engagement in counter-narcotics activities as "mission creep."

There are important similarities between the Taliban and Colombia's rebels, who go by the acronym FARC. Both groups began as an armed resistance to a corrupt government before evolving into a service agency for drug smugglers and international crime syndicates.

As Peters explains, heroin has transformed the Taliban into a "gangland-style grouping of tribal leaders, businessmen, regional warlords, and thugs." She surveyed 350 people involved in the drug trade along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: "Eight-one percent of respondents said the Taliban commanders' first priority was to make money, rather than to recapture territory and impose the strict brand of Islam they had espoused while in power."

Drug money has also enabled the Taliban to re-arm, recruit new members and expand its geographic reach. Today, much of southern Afghanistan is under de facto Taliban control.

The expanded Taliban influence facilitates the growing of even more poppies: More than 98 per cent of the 2008 crop came from insurgent-held areas.

Peters's principal concern is that the Taliban's involvement with heroin might enable its ally, al-Qaida, to strike U.S. territory with a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

Heroin is, of course, an insidious weapon of mass destruction itself. By 2007, Afghanistan accounted for a staggering 97 per cent of the global supply.

Cheap Afghan heroin has flooded into Vancouver on ships from China and India. The number of Canadian civilians dying as a result of Afghan heroin likely far exceeds the number of Canadian soldiers being killed on Afghan soil.

But destroying poppy fields in Afghanistan is not the answer. Peters explains that "wide-scale spraying would play into the hands of traffickers and terrorists" by driving up opium prices and thus increasing profit margins for drug dealers and the Taliban while making life even harder for Afghan farmers.

Nine years ago, the UN drug control program offered the Taliban $250 million to stop the cultivation of poppies. The Taliban agreed and was able to reduce the acreage planted with poppies by more than 90 per cent. However, the Taliban leadership also bought and stockpiled huge stores of opium before imposing the ban, selling it after prices had increased tenfold.

At the same time, "the poppy ban sparked a humanitarian disaster" for Afghan farmers, hundreds of thousands of whom defaulted on loans, sold off their land and livestock and fled to Pakistan.

Paying Afghan farmers to grow other crops is not the answer, either. In 2003, after the British introduced a $140-million crop substitution program, more Afghan farmers planted poppies in order to become eligible for being paid to switch crops the following year.

Eight years after 9/11, Peters argues that "the single greatest failure in the war on terror is not that Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture, or that the Taliban has staged a comeback, or even that al Qaeda is regrouping in Pakistan's tribal areas and probably planning fresh attacks on the West." Rather, "it's the spectacular incapacity of western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money that is keeping their networks afloat."

She advocates military action, including air strikes against heroin labs and drug-smuggling convoys and the targeted killing of upper- and mid-level traffickers. At the same time, she advocates negotiations with the Taliban and concedes that "defeating the insurgency and the drug trade will now take years, maybe decades of sustained investment and effort."

There is no denying that drug money, terrorism and technology are a potentially catastrophic mix. But Peters arrives at her military solution after only the briefest consideration of its possible limitations. For instance, although she identifies the parallel between Afghanistan and Colombia, she makes no attempt to assess whether the use of military force against drug traffickers has succeeded in the South American country.

Nor does she mention the concerns some NATO governments have expressed over targeting criminals, rather than combatants, with air strikes.

She dismisses a much-discussed alternative approach -- that of purchasing Afghan opium for medicinal use -- with the unconvincing argument that the demand for morphine has already been met. This is not the case in the developing world.

Peters also fails to mention the most radical and perhaps sensible policy alternative of all. Civil libertarians argue that legalizing drugs (and regulating and taxing them) would be more effective and, ultimately, less harmful, than futilely trying to eliminate them through force of arms.

These disagreements aside, there is one more reason why this is a must-read book: Peters has apparently succeeded in convincing Barack Obama, because many of her policy prescriptions have been adopted by him.

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of B.C. He is a board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Home Books Photo Gallery About David Survey Results Useful Links Submit Feedback