National Security and the War on Drugs - Research Paper Example

Afghanistan and Opium Poppies: National Security and the War on Drugs In October 2004 Afghanistan held its first democratic elections in decades. The U.S. backed candidate Hamid Karzai, won a significant majority, and remains to this day President of Afghanistan. At the time then U.S. President George W. Bush expressed pride in the election and optimism for the future, “Amazing isn't it? Freedom is beautiful.” (Zoroya and Leinwand, 2004) However, the election was not the only story in the media at the time. On October 26, 2004 before the final results from the election had been officially tabulated, USA Today, published an extensive story under the headline, “Rise of drug trade threat to Afghanistan's security”. The story lamented the rise of opium production and suggested that a record opium crop, valued at US $30 billion, and “a deeply rooted and ever-expanding opium industry” threatened to become “a competing power structure.” (Zoroya and Leinwand, 2004) Two years later, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CADS) cited a Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs report that estimated, “90% of the world's heroin could trace its roots to Afghanistan resulting in trafficking revenues equivalent to around $2.8 billion, or 1/3 of the country's domestic product.” It also quoted, Margaret Quinn, State Department Afghanistan Coordinator at the time, “Narcotics cultivation and trafficking is a corrupting influence on the Afghan government at virtually all levels and stunts the growth of the country's legitimate economy.” (Center for Advanced Defense Studies Staff, 2006, 1) Even as the institutions and practice of democracy were moving forward the narcotics trade was growing, and threatening efforts at democratization. Moreover, according to Doug Wankel, a former DEA official who was the head of the U.S. Counternarcotics program at the American Embassy in Kabul, there is a direct link between the drug trade, specifically the growing of Papaver Somniferum Linnaeus—the opium poppy—and America's security. “It's financing terrorism. It's financing subversive activities. It's financing warlordism. … And if its a threat to the government of Afghanistan, it's a direct threat to the national security interests of the United States.” In much the same way that Prohibition and the trafficking of illegal alcohol provided funds to criminals and gangsters during the 1920s, the opium trade in Afghanistan is currently providing revenue to the Taliban, Al Queda and other terrorist organizations. Source: (Jiggens, 2010) In the years since President Karzai's first election victory the opium trade and poppy cultivation have continued to flourish and grow (as the chart above indicates). At the same time, the international effort to defeat the insurgency has been stymied as continuing violence and casualties amongst U.S. and international forces demonstrate. This link is apparently reinforced by a geographic analysis of the connection between insurgent violence in Afghanistan and opium poppy cultivation. According to Angela Me, who is with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “ "If you had a map of Afghanistan where you map the most insecure regions and the regions where we expect the highest cultivation of opium, you can really clearly see that there is very high correlation." (Voice of America, 2010) At first glance, on a commonsense level, it would seem that the connection between violence in Afghanistan, U.S. Security and opium production are all directly correlated: The opium trade provides revenue to purchase weapons to the insurgents in Afghanistan (and international terrorists), instability in Afghanistan threatens to turn Afghanistan into a haven for international terrorists (as it once was for Al Queda), and these developments, therefore, makes the opium trade a direct threat to U.S. Security. However, critics of U.S. Policy, notably former Canadian diplomat and the University of California, Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott contest this view. Other critics, including voices within the U.S. Armed forces, agree with the analysis but insist that the military approach currently being pursued provides no solution to the problems of either opium production or insurgent violence and, ultimately, threaten U.S. National security rather than reinforcing it. Lieutenant-Colonel John A Glazes analysis of the situation, “Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy”, produced for the Strategic Studies Institute concludes with six recommendations and only one is at all related to military initiatives. (Glaze, 2007, 11-14) The following discussion will outline and analyze these various perspectives on the issues of national security and the war on drugs as they manifest themselves in Afghanistan. In two articles published in The Asia-Pacific Journal, in the spring of 2009 and 2010 respectively, Canadian-born UC Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott presents a strident critique of current U.S. policy in Afghanistan in terms of both national security and the war on drugs. Overall, it is his view that American policy in Afghanistan has both fostered the opium economy and increased threats to American national security. Scott's analysis of the situation commences in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He argues that American opposition to the Soviet occupation was fought by proxies, and at one stage removed. The level of removal was achieved by having CIA interests in Afghanistan managed by Pakistans Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA. Through the ISI the CIA recruited and funded Gulbuddin Hekmateyer, leader of a “marginal fundamentalist group” with limited public support, who “compensated for his lack of public support by developing an international traffic in opium and heroin.” (Scott, 2009) This entailed developing laboratories that processed the raw opium into heroin in the northwest frontier region of Pakistan, particularly Baluchistan, under the control of the ISI. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Hekmateyers Northern Alliance (NA) remained a key ally. Citing both Ahmed Rashid, author of Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (2008) and James Risen author of State of War: The Secret History of the Bush Administration (2006) he concludes, in Rashid's words, “the Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA allies.” (Scott, 2009) Simply put, the ouster of the communists in Afghanistan, and America's new allies were already deeply enmeshed in the heroin economy when they came to power. In further support of this assertion, he cites examples of links between the government and the opium trade. In 2005 the governor of Helmand province, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada was found by the DEA with nine tons (18,000 pounds) of heroin in his office. Akhundzada was Karzai's companion when the two returned to Afghanistan in 2001. He also cites House International Relations Committee testimony that Haji Bashar Noorzai, a leading drug lord had implicit permission to continue in the business provided he continued to turn over intelligence and confiscate Taliban arms. (Scott, 2009) Finally, in a more recent article he points out that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Presidents brother is widely known to be a leading opium trafficker. (Scott, 2010) It is important to note that these are not unsubstantiated assertions. The following sentence is the lead from a New York Times article published on October 27, 2009: “Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.” (Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, 2009) Similar, claims have been made against Akhundzada and Noorzai was finally arrested, and convicted of heroin trafficking in 2005. While Scotts assertion that “the Karzai government, not the Taliban, dominate the Afghan dope economy” may be hyperbole, it would seem to be irrefutable that members of the Afghan national and provincial government are at least as deeply tied into the opium economy as are the Taliban, Al Queda and other insurgents. Interestingly also, Scott ends his most recent article with a very measured statement that would also seem irrefutable based on this evidence: “There is no evidence to suggest that drug money from the CIA's trafficker assets fattened the financial accounts of the CIA itself or its officers. But the CIA profited indirectly in the drug traffic, and developed over the years a close relationship with it.” In general, then it can be asserted that Scott alleges that the national security objectives of the CIA have interfered with the war on drugs being waged by the DEA and similar agencies. Scott is not the only academic or analyst who has raised these concerns. Writing in the Asia Times Online in April of this year Alfred W McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin (2001), and JRW Smail professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison outlined similar concerns. His article, “The opium wars in Afghanistan” begins with a more moderate statement than is Scotts wont: “In ways that have escaped most observers, the Barack Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.” (McCoy, 2010) For McCoy, the ways that have escaped most observers are the ways in which the opium economy has become integral to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has been at war for thirty consecutive years. That violence and social dislocation has destroyed the traditional economy. The Russians, the Taliban and then the United States and their Northern Alliance allies “devastated the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the orchards,” and left impoverished rural Afghans no alternative to heroin production: All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a Gordian knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole solution. Like Alexanders legendary sword, it offered a straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any aid to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their orchards, Afghan farmers - including some 3 million returning refugees - found sustenance in opium, which had historically been but a small part of their agriculture. (McCoy, 2010) For most rural Afghans it is not a question of wanting to grow opium, it is a question of growing opium or starving. A hectare of opium is worth many times (from three to thirty depending on prices) more than cereal or other crops. Also, opium production is labor intensive and offers employment to family, friends and fellow villagers. Finally, relying on rural credit to purchase seed many farmers are compelled to purchase and plant opium seeds as often the only local with capital to lend is the local drug lord or opium processor. Thus, McCoy concludes, “Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during the first year of the US occupation, Afghanistan's opium harvest surged to 3,400 tonnes” and continues to rise. (McCoy, 2010) Unlike Scott, McCoy does not blame the U.S., specifically the CIA, for fostering the heroin economy. However, he does acknowledge that war, social dislocation and the devastation of the local economy, particularly the agricultural sector, over the past 30 years have made opium a more appealing crop choice, if not the only crop choice. Scott and McCoy are not voices crying in the wilderness. Richard Charles Alfred Holbrooke has lived his life inside the beltway. He is a career Foreign Service Officer. In his twenties he served in the Johnson White House. Before he was 35 he had spent a year as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, two years as Peace Corps Director in Morocco, and become Managing Editor of the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, a position he held until 1976 when he returned to the Foreign Service. He subsequently served as U.S. Ambassador to Germany and then the United Nations. The day President Obama was inaugurated he became U.S. Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Also, publicly, at least since 2008, he has questioned the idea that the war on terrorism and the war on drugs are one and the same thing in Afghanistan. On January 23, 2008, one year before his appointment as Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, while temporarily out of government and serving as Chairman of the Asia Society (a Washington think-tank) he published an op-ed piece in the influential Washington Post entitled, “Still Wrong in Afghanistan”. (Holbrooke, 2009) In this article he savaged the war on drugs as it was being conducted in Afghanistan and the impact it was having on the country's national security interests in that region and, by implication, on homeland security. The article commenced with the Bushism, "I'm a spray man myself" and went on to describe drug eradication programs in Afghanistan—at the time primarily aerial spraying—as not only ineffective but counter-productive: But even without aerial eradication, the program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may be the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy. It's not just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan. (Holbrooke, 2009) In his opinion, the war on drugs in Afghanistan's strategy of simply trying to eradicate opium fields was fueling the insurgency, strengthening America's opponents and, therefore, lessening national security. Moreover, Holbrooke is not alone amongst Washington insiders in coming to this conclusion. Reports by the RAND Corporation in 2008 and the Carnegie Institute in 2009, both organizations the apotheosis of a radical Canadian-born Berkeley professor, also argue against eradication as the proper war on drugs strategy and naked force as a military strategy in Afghanistan. (Scott, 2009) Even the military is not entirely opposed to these concepts nor has it been since at least 2007, In October of that year Air Force Lt-Col. John A Glazer, under the auspices of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. War College, published “Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy”. Admittedly, the reports first recommendation called for increased troop levels in Afghanistan (not entirely surprising considering its author and origins. However, its subsequent five recommendations flew in the face of the spray man's approach. They recommended an entirely different approach to counternarcotics strategy: (2) substantially increase financial aid; (3) deemphasize opium eradication; (4) focus on long-term alternative livelihoods; (5) aggressively pursue drug kingpins and corrupt government officials; and (6) explore the possibility of Afghanistan’s entry to the licit opium market. (Glazer, 2007, 14) Clearly, as early as 2007 the U.S. War College was searching for an alternative to the war on drugs eradication strategy. Not surprisingly in light of the shift in thinking occurring in the military, the election of President Obama and the appointment of Holbrooke the U.S. military began to experiment with alternatives to the simple strategy of eradication. Alternatives that attempt to unite war on drugs with the objectives of the national security establishment, the military and the executive or, at least, recognize that the two are not always compatible. Earlier this year, under new Officer Commanding General Stanley McChrystal the U.S. and allied forces in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) along with Afghan forces opened an offensive near Marja, fifty miles west of Kandahar, an area of both intense poppy cultivation and insurgent activity. They were specifically detailed to provide local security, engage the insurgency and not worry about poppy cultivation or poppy eradication. (The result was the anomalous yet fascinating photographs in “Appendix I: U.S. Military Photographs of Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan” showing U.S. And allied troops on patrol through fields of ripening poppies.) On March 22, 2010 the New York Times included a story headlined, “U.S. Turns a blind eye to opium in Afghan town” written by Rod Nordlund. “The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication...” the story began. Moreover, the policy shift had the full support of Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one,” he said. (Nordlund, 2010) In a second article published on May 22 of this year an officer in the field told New York Times reporter C. J. Chivers, “in a population-centric campaign, we don't want to turn the farmers against us.” The U.S. Embassy in Kabul declined comment explaining simply “that the matter was under review.” (Chivers, 2010) A counter-insurgency campaign in military terms and democratization in political terms amounts to an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the populace and gain their acceptance of the legitimate government. In economic terms that means not threatening their income and, like it or not, in Marja and many other parts of Afghanistan, that means, at least at the moment, no eradicating their only cash crop, opium poppies. Interestingly, according to the New York Times the most vociferous opponents of this new approach are Afghan officials. Zulmai Afzali, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics told the Times, “the Taliban are the ones who profit from opium, so you are letting your enemy get financed by this so he can turn around and kill you back.” (Nordlund, 2010) Perhaps. However, there is also an interesting counterpoint that can be made although it is only supposition. If, in fact, many Afghan government officials benefit from the opium trade it is in their best interests to see the price of opium rise. Eradication programs, particularly in Taliban controlled areas would limit the supply of opium and drive the price up: This would also increase the profits for individuals involved in the trade not caught up in the eradication campaigns: Namely, producers, processors and exporters not linked to the Taliban but rather, operating within the government. This theory could very well explain Afghan's government opposition to this new strategy. Regardless, this shift in U.S. strategy indicates clear recognition of the fact that national security interests and the war on drugs are not necessarily congruent or even compatible in Afghanistan. Ultimately, the best approach may be that advocated by both McCoy and Lt-Col. Glaze. Opium is used not only to produce illicit drugs for sale on the black market. It is also the basic ingredient in licit narcotics such as the painkillers morphine and codeine. Rather than eliminating Afghan opium production the best solution may be incorporating it into the licit supply chain. If this were to happen Afghanistan would no longer be the worlds largest supplier of black market narcotics. Instead, Afghan farmers would have a legal and legitimate cash crop and their production would become an essential component in the legal production of painkillers that offer pain management and relief to some of the sickest members of society throughout the globe. This outcome would also advance national security goals as the central government and U.S. and foreign forces would not necessarily be viewed as intrusive. In this situation the goals of the war on drugs and of national security would be congruent: The standard of living in Afghanistan would rise, the central government would gain legitimacy, the insurgency would be undermined and U.S. national security would be enhanced. Read More