(BoilingFrogs) – The revelation1 that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother Wali is on the Central Intelligence Agency payroll and is a known drug lord has complicated President Obama’s already torturous internal debate on Afghanistan and dredged up questions about long-standing ties between the C.I.A. and illegal drugs.
Tuesday, 17. November 2009
U.S. backed-drug gangs fight Taliban’s traffickers in endless turf battle
From Laos 2 to Nicaragua 3 to Afghanistan, and many places in between, the C.I.A has a long history of links to illegal drugs as a means to buy allies and fund off-the-books missions.
The C.I.A first backed Afghan drug lords in 1979. David Musto and Joyce Lowinson, members of the White House’s Strategic Council on Drug Abuse, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed on May 22, 1980:
“We worry about the growing of opium in Afghanistan or Pakistan by rebel tribesmen who apparently are the chief adversaries of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America (chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency) helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?”4
Drug Enforcement Agency reports in 1980 showed Afghan rebel movements were “determined in part by opium planting and harvest seasons.”5
One U.S.-backed drug lord was Yunas Khalis. “He spent most of his time fighting, but the wars were not primarily with the Soviets,” writes Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair.6“Instead, Khalis battled other Afghan rebel groups, the object of the conflicts being control of poppy fields and the roads and trails from them to his seven heroin labs near his headquarters in the town of Ribat al Ali. Sixty percent of Afghanistan’s opium crop was cultivated in the Helmand Valley, with an irrigation infrastructure underwritten by USAID.”
The Soviets withdrew. But there were consequences for the short-term strategy of “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend,” when your new friend is an opium kingpin or religious fanatic. The civil war that followed brought the Taliban to power, with its monstrous mistreatment of women and girls. That did not stop the U.S. from negotiating with them over a pipeline deal, which eventually fell through.7
The Taliban then hosted Osama bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11 and the current eight-year U.S. war began. The stated purpose is to prevent the Taliban from regaining power so it cannot again facilitate another strike against the U.S. But security analysts are far from convinced that would likely happen again.
The war has the support of some Western women’s rights groups who contend that preventing a Taliban comeback is enough reason to spill blood and treasure (and support drug lords). Many Afghan women disagree, arguing that NATO has made life worse for them. The U.S. backed-Karzai and tribal chiefs are little better. Girls now go to school. But Karzai signed a law making it illegal for a Shia wife to refuse sex with her husband, who can deny her food if she does.
The White House says it’s also trying to eradicate the source of 92 percent of the world’s opium that fuels organized crime and enslaves 15 million addicts around the world. But opium production continues to increase and provides most funding for the religious Taliban. According to a new U.N. report, the Taliban derive as much as $160 million a year through imposition of an ushr tithe on opium production and trade.
“We are already a narco-state,” Mohammad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission told the Christian Science Monitor. “If the governors in many parts of the country are involved in the drug trade, if a minister is directly or indirectly getting benefits from drug trade, and if a chief of police gets money from drug traffickers, then how else do you define a narco-state?” Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan’s minister of tribal and frontier affairs, told the paper “the government has become so full of drug smugglers that cabinet meetings have become a farce.”8 After Malalai Joya, a Member of Parliament, denounced drug traffickers and warlords in government, she escaped several attempts on her life.
The U.S. supports this drug-lord government with massive amounts of aid. Washington spends huge sums more fighting the drug-lord-supported Taliban. In August, the Pentagon put 50 Taliban-tied drug traffickers on a list to be captured or killed. But it singled out none tied to the government.
The war in Afghanistan is a large-scale Brooklyn turf battle among petty drug gangs. It is our drug lords against theirs: a battle for control of a $65 billion a year illegal industry.
Is this a temporary arrangement to defeat the Taliban after which the U.S. would then turn against its own drug lords? That hardly seems likely given that a military defeat of the Taliban would require as many as 800,000 U.S. troops, according to the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counter-insurgency. In fact there has been a direct correlation between the growth of NATO forces and the growth of the Taliban, spurring the argument that a reduction of the one will lead to the reduction of the other.
In some past cases, the C.I.A. used laundered drug money to finance operations. A Congressional investigation could determine whether that is still happening. Former C.I.A. director George Tenet complained at the beginning of the war that the agency’s efforts were being underfunded 9. Where did those bags of cash given out to warlords come from?
At the very least, the C.I.A. is supplying arms and money to keep the Afghan drug trade going. It is supporting the Kandahar Strike Force, which pays rent to Karzai’s brother. I asked a senior U.N. official familiar with the U.N.’s anti-drug policies whether he thought the C.I.A. was profiting from the Afghan drug trade. “You have good instincts, follow your guts,” he told me.
Officials are either in denial, or want to hide from the taxpayers their unwitting generous support of misogynistic drug gangs to fight the Taliban. I asked a senior U.S. official at the U.N. about the payments to Karzai’s brother. She told me she knew nothing about it.
I then asked U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference. He wouldn’t comment on Wali Karzai, but said, “I have been repeatedly urging, whenever I had an opportunity of meeting President Karzai in the past, that he must make sure to eradicate these corrupt practices, including opium cultivation and opium trafficking. … Unless he addresses these corrupt practices prevalent in Afghanistan, it will not be possible to expect to have credible governance.”
It’s no wonder President Obama is taking so long. There is no solution: only bad short-term outcomes, some worse than others.
If he pulls out the troops and the Taliban resume power the Republicans would skin him alive in the mid-term and next presidential election. He cannot send the 800,000 troops the Army manual says is needed. If he deploys 40,000 more they will get bogged down, casualties will mount, with no resolution to the war, and he’ll suffer politically too. I’m not sure he likes the idea of forming alliances with drug traffickers, but what would be the consequences if he publicly confirmed the Wali Karzai story and said those days were over?
Perhaps the president might listen to the Afghan people. They want development, an end to occupation, to corruption, to civilian casualties at NATO’s hands and an alternative to both the Taliban and the government.10
That means Obama needs to find an alternative, a counterforce to both drug gangs. One idea might be to support moderate Pashtun and Baluchi movements.
The Pashtun Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan were part of Afghanistan for a thousand years before Britain made it part of British India in 1893. The border was known as the Durand Line—named for Mortimer Durand, the British India foreign secretary. It split the Pashtun people into two different countries.
The same happened to the Baluchis further south. When Pakistan succeeded British India in 1947 it took over the border provinces, where it is currently fighting the Pakistani Taliban, with the fate of Pakistan and possibly its nuclear arsenal at stake.
It might be time for the U.S. and the C.I.A. to fight the drug lords on all sides and instead foster a popular Pashtun alternative to both the Taliban and the Pashtun Karzai. The White House has talked about a so-called “small-t” Taliban strategy. But there are no “moderate” Taliban. They are extremists by definition that do not represent most Pashtuns who are fed up with the corruption, violence and trafficking of both sides.
There is a huge pool of disaffected people to work with. But Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency has made a point of killing “moderates” that try to form political groups by inviting them in and then disposing of them, say Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.11 “It’s a very nasty business and the U.S. has been supporting it for 30 years,” they told me. “Most Afghans that work for the Taliban do it for the money, not for politics.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened a few days ago to cut off aid to Karzai’s government if he does not fight corruption in earnest. That is a start that could lead to withdrawing aid from drug lords, starting with Karzai’s brother, and supporting anti-Taliban Pashtuns, even with arms.
With NATO they could battle drug gangs on both sides to eradicate the crop while development aid is poured into alternative industries and agriculture. The C.I.A. could drop its adopt-a-drug trafficker program. If you defeat drugs, you could defeat the Taliban and Afghan government corruption. Let them thrive and this conflict will carry on.
This drawn-out scenario could well end in disaster like many others. But it might also give the Afghan people, non-Pashtuns alike, a fighting chance.
Source: BoilingFrogs
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