http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13524

Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, May 8, 2009


Why one should think of Afghanistan, not as a "failed state," but as a heroin-ravaged
state

One of the most frustrating features of observing American foreign policy is to see the
gap between the encapsulated thinking of the national security bureaucracy and the
sensible unfettered observations of the experts outside. In the case of Afghanistan,
outside commentators have called for terminating current specific American policies
and tactics – many reminiscent of the US in Vietnam.

Observers decry the use of air strikes to decapitate the Taliban and al Qaeda, usually
resulting in the death of other civilians. They counsel against the insertion of more
and more US and other foreign troops, in an effort to secure the safety and
allegiance of the population. And they regret the on-going interference in the fragile
Afghan political process, in order to secure outcomes desired in Washington.[1]

One root source for this gap between official and outside opinion will not be
addressed soon – the conduct of crucial decision-making in secrecy, not by those
who know the area, but by those skilled enough in bureaucratic politics to have
earned the highest security clearances. However it may be more productive to
criticize the mindset shared by the decision-makers, and to point out elements of the
false consciousness which frames it, and which should be corrigible by common
sense.

Why One Should Think of So-Called "Failed States" as "Ravaged States"

I have in mind the bureaucratically convenient concept of Afghanistan as a failed or
failing state. This epithet has been frequently applied to Afghanistan since 9/11,
2001, and also to other areas where the United States is eager or at least ready to
intervene – notably Somalia and Guinea-Bissau. The concept conveniently suggests
that the problem is local, and requires outside assistance from other more successful
and benevolent states. In this respect, the term "failed state" stands in the place of
the now discredited term "undeveloped country," with its similar implication that
there was a defect in any such country to be remedied by the "developed" western
nations.

Most outside experts would agree that the states commonly looked on as "failed," --
notably Afghanistan, but also Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo –
share a different feature. It is better to think of them not as failed states but as
ravaged states, ravaged primarily from the intrusions of outside powers. The policy
implications of recognizing that a state has been ravaged are complex and
ambiguous. Some might see past abuses in such a state as an argument against any
outside involvement whatsoever. Others might see a duty for continued intervention,
but only by using different methods, in order to compensate for the damage already
inflicted.

The past ravaging of Somalia and the Congo (formerly Zaire) is now indisputable.
These two former colonies were among the most ruthlessly exploited of any in Africa
by their European invaders. In the course of this exploitation, their social structures
were systematically uprooted and never replaced by anything viable. Thus they are
best understood as ravaged states, using the word "state" here in its most generic
sense.

But the word "state" itself is problematic, when applied to the arbitrary divisions of
Africa agreed on by European powers for their own purposes in the 19th century.
Many of the straight lines overriding the tribal entities of Africa and separating them
into colonies were established by European powers at a Berlin conference in
1884-85.[2] Our loosest dictionary definition of "state" is "body politic," implying an
organic coherence which most of these entities have never possessed. The great
powers played similar games in Asia, which are still causing misery in areas like the
Shan states of Myanmar, or the tribes of West Papua.

Still less can African states be considered modern states as defined by Max Weber,
when he wrote that the modern state "successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly
of the legitimate use of violence [Gewaltmonopol] in the enforcement of its order."[3]
The Congo in particular has been so devoid of any state features in its past history
that it might be better to think of it as a ravaged area, not even as a ravaged state.

The Historical Ravaging of Afghanistan

Afghanistan in contrast can be called a state, because of its past history as a
kingdom, albeit one combining diverse peoples and languages on both sides of the
forbidding Hindu Kush. But almost from the outset of that Durrani kingdom in the
18th century, Afghanistan too was a state ravaged by foreign interests. Even though
technically Afghanistan was never a colony, Afghanistan’s rulers were alternatively
propped up and then deposed by Britain and Russia, who were competing for
influence in an area they agreed to recognize as a glacis or neutral area between
them.

Such social stability as there existed in the Durrani Afghan kingdom, a loose coalition
of tribal leaders, was the product of tolerance and circumspection, the opposite of a
monopolistic imposition of central power. A symptom of this dispersion of power was
the inability of anyone to build railways inside Afghanistan – one of the major aspects
of nation building in neighboring countries.[4]

The British, fearing Russian influence in Afghanistan, persistently interfered with this
equilibrium of tolerance. This was notably the case with the British foray of 1839, in
which their 12,000-man army was completely annihilated except for one doctor. The
British claimed to be supporting the claim of one Durrani family member, Shuja
Shah, an anglophile whom they brought back from exile in India. With the disastrous
British retreat in 1842, Shuja Shah was assassinated.

The social fabric of Afghanistan, to begin with a complex tribal network, was badly
disrupted by such interventions. Particularly after World War II, the Cold War
widened the gap between Kabul and the countryside. Afghan cities moved towards a
more western urban culture, as successive generations of bureaucrats were trained
in Moscow. They thus became progressively more alienated from the Afghan rural
areas, which they were trained to regard as reactionary, uncivilized, and outdated.

Meanwhile, especially after 1980, moderate Sufi leaders in the countryside were
progressively displaced in favor of radical jihadist Islamist leaders, thanks to massive
funding from agents of the Pakistani ISI, dispersing funds that came in fact from
Saudi Arabia and the United States. Already in the 1970s, as oil profits skyrocketed,
representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim World League, with
Iranian and CIA support, "arrived on the Afghan scene with bulging bankrolls."[5]
Thus the inevitable civil war that ensued in 1978, and led to the Soviet invasion of
1980, can be attributed chiefly to Cold War forces outside Afghanistan itself.

Afghanistan was torn apart by this foreign-inspired conflict in the 1980s. It is being
torn apart again by the American military presence today. Although Americans were
initially well received by many Afghans when they first arrived in 2001, the U.S.
military campaign has driven more and more to support the Taliban. According to a
February 2009 ABC poll, only 18 percent of Afghanis support more US troops in their
country.

Thus it is important to recognize that Afghanistan is a state ravaged by external
forces, and not just think of it as a failing one.

The Foreign Origins of the Forces Ravaging Afghanistan Today: Jihadi Salafist
Islamism and Heroin

These external forces include the staggering rise of both jihadi salafism and opium
production in Afghanistan, following the interventions there two decades ago by the
United States and the Soviet Union. In dispersing US and Saudi funds to the Afghan
resistance, the ISI gave half of the funds it dispersed to two marginal fundamentalist
groups, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Razul Sayyaf, which it knew it could
control – precisely because they lacked popular support.[6] The popularly based
resistance groups, organized on tribal lines, were hostile to this jihadi salafist
influence: they were "repelled by fundamentalist demands for the abolition of the
tribal structure as incompatible with [the salafist] conception of a centralized Islamic
state."[7]

Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, with ISI and CIA protection, began immediately to
compensate for his lack of popular support by developing an international traffic in
opium and heroin, not on his own, however, but with ISI and foreign assistance.
After Pakistan banned opium cultivation in February 1979 and Iran followed suit in
April, the absence of legal controls in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan
‘‘attracted Western drug cartels and ‘scientists’ (including ‘some "fortune-seekers"
from Europe and the US’) to establish heroin processing facilities in the tribal belt."[8]

Heroin labs had opened in the North-West Frontier province by 1979 (a fact duly
noted by the Canadian Maclean’s Magazine of April 30, 1979). According to Alfred
McCoy, ‘‘By 1980 Pakistan-Afghan opium dominated the European market and
supplied 60 percent of America’s illicit demand as well.’’[9] McCoy also records that
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar controlled a complex of six heroin laboratories in a region of
Baluchistan ‘‘where the ISI was in total control.’’[10]

The global epidemic of Afghan heroin, in other words, was not generated by
Afghanistan, but was inflicted on Afghanistan by outside forces.[11] It remains true
today that although 90 percent of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan, the
Afghan share of proceeds from the global heroin network, in dollar terms, is only
about ten percent of the whole.

In 2007, Afghanistan supplied 93% of the world's opium, according to the U.S. State
Department. Illicit poppy production, meanwhile, brings $4 billion into
Afghanistan,[12] or more than half the country’s total economy of $7.5 billion,
according to the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC).[13] It also
represents about half of the economy of Pakistan, and of the ISI in particular.[14]

Destroying the labs has always been an obvious option, but for years America refused
to do so for political reasons. In 2001 the Taliban and bin Laden were estimated by
the CIA to be earning up to 10 per cent of Afghanistan’s drug revenues, then
estimated at between 6.5 and 10 billion U.S. dollars a year.[15] This income of
perhaps $1 billion was less than that earned by Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI,
parts of which had become the key to the drug trade in Central Asia. The UN Drug
Control Program (UNDCP) estimated in 1999 that the ISI made around $2.5 billion
annually from the sale of illegal drugs.[16]

At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, "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 [Northern
Alliance] allies."[17] Rashid was "told by UNODC officials that the Americans knew far
more about the drug labs than they claimed to know, and the failure to bomb them
was a major setback to the counter-narcotics effort."[18] James Risen reports that
the ongoing refusal to pursue the targeted drug labs came from neocons at the top
of America’s national security bureaucracy, including Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz,
Zalmay Khalilzad, and their patron Donald Rumsfeld.[19]

There were humanitarian as well as political reasons for tolerating the drug economy
in 2001. Without it that winter many Afghans would have faced starvation. But the
CIA had mounted its coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even
importing drug traffickers, many of them old assets from the 1980s. An example was
Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon in France, whom "British and American
officials…met with and persuaded … to return to Afghanistan.[20]

Thanks in large part to the CIA-backed anti-Soviet campaign of the 1980s,
Afghanistan today is a drug-corrupted or heroin-ravaged society from top to bottom.
On an international index measuring corruption, Afghanistan ranks as #176 out of
180 countries. (Somalia is 180th).[21] Karzai returned from America to his native
country vowing to fight drugs, yet today it is recognized that his friends, family, and
allies are deeply involved in the traffic.[22]

In 2005, for example, Drug Enforcement Administration agents found more than nine
tons of opium in the office of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the governor of
Helmand Province, and a close friend of Karzai who had accompanied him into
Afghanistan in 2001 on a motorbike. The British successfully demanded that he be
removed from office.[23] But the news report confirming that Akhunzada had been
removed announced also that he had been simultaneously given a seat in the Afghan
senate.[24]

Former warlord and provincial governor Gul Agha Sherzai, an American favorite who
recently endorsed Karzai’s re-election campaign, has also been linked to the drugs
trade.[25] In 2002 Gul Agha Sherzai was the go-between in an extraordinary deal
between the Americans and leading trafficker Haji Bashar Noorzai, whereby the
Americans agreed to tolerate Noorzai’s drug-trafficking in exchange for supplying
intelligence on and arms of the Taliban.[26] By 2004, according to House
International Relations Committee testimony, Noorzai was smuggling two metric tons
of heroin to Pakistan every eight weeks.[27] Noorzai was finally arrested in New York
in 2005, having come to this country at the invitation of a private intelligence firm
which failed to supply him the kind of immunity usually provided by the CIA.[28]

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

Important as heroin may have become to the Afghan and Pakistani political
economies, the local proceeds are only a small share of the global heroin traffic.
According to the UN, the ultimate value in world markets in 2007 of Afghanistan’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 $40 billion, this would mean that 90 percent of the
profit was earned by forces outside of Afghanistan.[29]

It follows that there are many players with a much larger financial stake in the
Afghan drug traffic than local Afghan drug lords, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Sibel
Edmonds has charged that Pakistani and Turkish intelligence, working together,
utilize the resources of the international networks transmitting Afghan heroin.[30]
Others have also written about the ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkish
narco-intelligence connection.[31]

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is an ISI-backed Islamist drug route of al
Qaeda allies across North Central Asia, reaching from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
through Azerbaijan and Turkey to Kosovo.[32] Dennis Dayle, a former top-level DEA
agent in the Middle East, has corroborated the CIA interest in that region’s drug
connection. I was present when he told an anti-drug conference that "In my 30-year
history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major
targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the
CIA."[33]

Above all, it has been estimated that 80 percent or more of the profits from the traffic
are reaped in the countries of consumption. The UNODC Executive Director, Antonio
Maria Costa, has reported that "money made in illicit drug trade has been used to
keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis."[34]

Expanded World Drug Production as a Product of U.S. Interventions

The truth is that since World War II the CIA, without establishment opposition, has
become addicted to the use of assets who are drug-traffickers, and there is no
reason to assume that they have begun to break this addiction. The devastating
consequences of CIA use and protection of traffickers can be seen in the statistics of
drug production, which increases where America intervenes, and also declines when
American intervention ends.

Just as the indirect American intervention of 1979 was followed by an unprecedented
increase in Afghan opium production, so the pattern has repeated itself since the
American invasion of 2001. Opium poppy cultivation in hectares more than doubled,
from a previous high of 91,000 in 1999 (reduced by the Taliban to 8,000 in 2001) to
165,000 in 2006 and 193,000 in 2007. (Though 2008 saw a reduced planting of
157,000 hectares, this was chiefly explained by previous over-production, in excess of
what the world market could absorb.

No one should have been surprised by these increases: they merely repeated the
dramatic increases in every other drug-producing area where America has become
militarily or politically involved. This was demonstrated over and over in the 1950s, in
Burma (thanks to CIA intervention, from 40 tons in 1939 to 600 tons in 1970),[35] in
Thailand (from 7 tons in 1939 to 200 tons in 1968) and Laos (less than 15 tons in
1939 to 50 tons in 1973).[36]

The most dramatic case is that of Colombia, where the intervention of U.S. troops
since the late 1980s has been misleadingly justified as a part of a "war on drugs." At
a conference in 1990 I predicted that this intervention would be followed by an
increase in drug production, not a reduction.[37] But even I was surprised by the
size of the increase that ensued. Coca production in Colombia tripled between 1991
and 1999 (from 3.8 to 12.3 thousand hectares), while the cultivation of opium poppy
increased by a multiple of 5.6 (from .13 to .75 thousand hectares).[38]

I am not suggesting that there is any single explanation for this pattern of drug
increase. But it is essential that we recognize American intervention as part of the
problem, rather than simply look to it than as a solution.

It is accepted in Washington that Afghan drug production is a major source of all the
problems America faces in Afghanistan today. Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s
special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in a 2008 Op-Ed that drugs
are at the heart of America’s problems in Afghanistan, and "breaking the narco-state
in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail."[39] It is true that, as history has
shown, drugs sustain jihadi salafism, far more surely than jihadi salafism sustains
drugs.[40]

But do not expect America’s present government and policies to seriously combat the
drug traffic.

American Failure to Analyze the Heroin Epidemic

Instead American policy-makers, preserving the mindset of Afghanistan as a "failed
state," persist in treating the drug traffic as a local Afghan problem, not as an
American one. This is true even of Holbrooke, who more than most has earned the
reputation of a pragmatic realist on drug matters.

In his 2008 Op-Ed noting that "breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential,"
Holbrooke admitted that this will not be easy, because of the pervasiveness of today’s
drug traffic, "whose dollar value equals about 50% of the country's official gross
domestic product."[41]

Holbrooke excoriated America’s existing drug-eradication strategies, particular aerial
spraying of poppy fields: "The … program, which costs around $1 billion a year, may
be the single most ineffective policy 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."

Yet Holbrooke’s main recommendation was for "a temporary suspension of
eradication in insecure areas, as part of an on-going campaign that "will take years,
and … cannot be won as long as the border areas in Pakistan are havens for the
Taliban and al-Qaeda."[42] He did not propose any alternative approach to the drug
problem.

Washington’s perplexity about Afghan drugs became even more clear on March 27,
2009, at a press briefing by Holbrooke the morning after President Barack Obama
unveiled his new Afghanistan policy.

Asked about the priority of drug fighting in the Afghanistan review, Holbrooke, as he
was leaving the briefing, said "We're going to have to rethink the drug problem."
That was interesting. He went on: "a complete rethink." He noted that the
policymakers who had worked on the Afghanistan review "didn't come to a firm, final
conclusion" on the opium question. "It's just so damn complicated," Holbrooke
explained. Did that mean that the opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan should be
canned? "You can't eliminate the whole eradication program," he exclaimed. But that
remark did make it seem that he backed an easing up of some sort. "You have to put
more emphasis on the agricultural sector," he added.[43]

A few days earlier Holbrooke had already indicated that he would like to divert
eradication funds into funds for alternative livelihoods for farmers. But farmers are
not traffickers, and Holbrooke’s renewed emphasis on them only confirms
Washington’s reluctance to go after the drug traffic itself.[44]

According to Holbrooke, the new Obama strategy for Afghanistan would scale back
the ambitions of the Bush administration to turn the country into a functioning
democracy, and would concentrate instead on security and counter-terrorism.[45]
Obama himself stressed that "we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt,
dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their
return to either country in the future."[46]

The U.S. response will involve a military, a diplomatic, and an economic
developmental component. Moreover the military role will increase, perhaps far more
than has yet been officially indicated.[47] Lawrence Korb, an Obama adviser, has
submitted a report which calls for "using all the elements of U.S. national power --
diplomatic, economic and military -- in a sustained effort that could last as long as
another 10 years."[48] On March 19, 2009, at the University of Pittsburgh, Korb
suggested that a successful campaign might require 100,000 troops.[49]

This persistent search for a military solution runs directly counter to the RAND
Corporation’s recommendation in 2008 for combating al-Qaeda. RAND reported that
military force led to the end of terrorist groups in only 7 percent of cases where it
was used. And RAND concluded:

Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa'ida, local
military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better
understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a
light U.S. military footprint or none at all.[50]

The same considerations extend to operations against the Taliban. A recent study for
the Carnegie Endowment concluded that "the presence of foreign troops is the most
important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."[51] And as Ivan Eland of
the Independent Institute told the Orange County Register, ""U.S. military activity in
Afghanistan has already contributed to a resurgence of Taliban and other insurgent
activity in Pakistan."[52]

But such elementary common sense is unlikely to persuade RAND’s employers at the
Pentagon. To justify its global strategic posture of what it calls "full-spectrum
dominance," the Pentagon badly needs the "war against terror" in Afghanistan, just
as a decade ago it needed the counter-productive "war against drugs" in Colombia.
To quote from the Defense Department’s explanation of the JCS strategic document
Joint Vision 2020, "Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces,
operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation
across the range of military operations."[53] But this is a phantasy: "full-spectrum
dominance" can no more control the situation in Afghanistan than Canute could
control the movement of the tides. America’s experience in Iraq, a terrain far less
favorable to guerrillas, should have made this clear.

Full-spectrum dominance is of course not just an end in itself, it is also lobbied for by
far-flung American corporations overseas, especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil
with huge investments in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. As Michael Klare
noted in his book Resource Wars, a secondary objective of the U.S. campaign in
Afghanistan was "to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area,
and to ensure continued flow of oil."[54]

The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the protracted conflict
generated by "full-spectrum dominance" in Afghanistan, and some of the
beneficiaries may have been secretly lobbying for it. And I fear that all the client
intelligence assets organized about the movement of Afghan heroin through Central
Asia and beyond will, without a clear change in policy, continue as before to be
protected by the CIA.

There will certainly continue to be targets for America’s efforts at global dominance,
as long as America continues to ravage states, in the name of rescuing them from
"failing." An emerging new target is Pakistan, where the Obama administration plans
to increase the number of Predator drone attacks, despite the sharp opposition of the
Pakistan government.[55] It is clear that these Predator strikes are a major reason for
the recent rapid growth of the Pakistan Taliban, and why formerly peaceful districts
like the Swat valley have now been ceded by the Pakistan military to control by the
Taliban.[56]

Common sense will not produce unanimous recommendations for what should
happen within Afghanistan. Some observers are partial to the urban culture of Kabul,
and particularly to the campaign there to improve the status and rights of women.
Others are sympathetic to the elaborate tribal system that ruled the countryside for
generations. Still others accept the modifications introduced by the Taliban as a
needed social revolution. Finally there are the security issues presented by the
increasing instability of neighboring Pakistan, a nuclear power.

What common sense says clearly is that the Afghan crisis could be eased somewhat
by changes in the behavior of the United States. If America truly wishes a degree of
social stability to return to that area, it would seem obvious that, as a first step:

1) President Obama should renounce JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020,
with its pretentious and nonsensical ambition of using U.S. forces to "control any
situation."

2) The United States should consider apologizing for past ravagings of the Muslim
world, and specifically its role in the 1953 overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran, in the 1953
assassination of Abd al-Karim Qasim in Iraq, and in assisting Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in
the 1980s to impose his murderous and drug-trafficking presence in Afghanistan.
Ideally it would apologize also for its recent military violations of the Pakistani border,
and renounce them.

3) President Obama should accept the recommendation of the RAND Corporation
that in operations against al-Qaeda, the U.S. should employ "a light military footprint
or none at all."

4) President Obama should make it clear that the CIA in future must desist from
protecting drug traffickers around the world who become targets of the DEA.

In short, President Obama should make it clear that America no longer has ambitions
to establish military or covert control over a unipolar world, and that it wishes to
return to its earlier posture in a multipolar world community.

It is common sense, in short, that America’s own interests would be best served by
becoming a post-imperial society. Unfortunately it is not likely that common sense will
prevail against the special interests of what has been called the "petroleum-military-
complex," along with others, including drug-traffickers, with a stake in America’s
current military posture.

Vast bureaucratic systems, like that of the Soviet Union two decades ago, are like
aircraft carriers, notoriously difficult to shift into a fresh direction. It would appear
that those in America’s national security bureaucracy, like the bureaucrats of Great
Britain a century ago, are still dedicated to squandering away America’s strength, in a
futile effort to preserve a corrupt and increasingly unstable regiment of global power.

Just as a by-product of European colonialism a century ago was third-world
communism, so these American efforts, if not terminated or radically revised, may
produce as by-product an ever widening spread of jihadi salafist terrorism, suicide
bombers, and guerrillas.

In 1962 common sense extricated the Kennedy administration from a potentially
disastrous nuclear confrontation with Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis. It would
be nice to think that America is capable of correcting its foreign policy by common
sense again. But the absence of debate about Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the White
House, in Congress, and in the country, is depressing

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent book is The
War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, It can be ordered from the
Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store.

Scott’s website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.



NOTES

[1] Five of the current candidates for Afghan president are U.S. citizens. The
Independent (January 23, 2009) has reported that Washington is searching for a
"dream ticket" to oust the incumbent and former favorite, Hamid Karzai, now
condemned as corrupt. PressTV goes farther: "Washington is using its political clout
to influence the outcome of the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan, a
report says. The US embassy in Kabul has urged Afghanistan's leading presidential
hopefuls to withdraw from the race in favor of Ali Ahmad Jalali -- a candidate that is
more preferred by Washington, reported Pakistan's Ummat daily. In return, US
officials have promised to guarantee key positions for the three candidates -- which
include finance minister Ashraf Ghani, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and
political activist Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi -- in the next Afghan government. The move
received instant condemnation as flagrant US interference in Afghan politics and
internal affairs. Jalali -- who is viewed as the main rival of President Hamed Karzai in
the August presidential elections -- is a US citizen and former Afghan minister of the
interior. His candidacy is seen as a direct violation of the Chapter Three, Article Sixty
Two of Afghanistan's Constitution, which states that only an Afghan citizen has the
right to run for president - which means that Jalali would have to apply for Afghan
citizenship first. Zalmay Khalilzad and Ashraf Ghani, two other candidates vying for
presidency, also hold US citizenship" (http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=91334
§ionid=351020403).

[2] Jeffrey Ira Herbst, States and Power in Africa (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 and Economic Organization (New York: Free
Press, 1964), 154.

[4] Railways approach Afghanistan from the north, easy, south, and west. The only
two with foothold terminals in Afghanistan itself are those built by the Soviet Union in
the 1980s, from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

[5] Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the
Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. Harrison heard
about the program in 1975 from the Shah’s Ambassador to the United Nations, "who
pointed to it proudly as an example of Iranian-American cooperation."

[6] See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of 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 to a contemporary account,
Americans and Europeans star ted becoming involved in drug smuggling out of
Afghanistan from the early 1970s; see Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti, The
International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers (New York: Pantheon,
1974), 190 –92.

[9] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago
Review Press, 2001), 447.

[10] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 458; Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The
Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 148 (labs); Emdad-ul
Haq, Drugs in South Asia, 189 (ISI).

[11] Before 1979 little Afghan opium or heroin reached markets beyond Pakistan and
Iran (McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 469-71).

[12] USA Today, January 12, 2009.

[13] Newsweek, Apr 7, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577.

[14] Cf. S. Hasan Asad, , "Shadow economy and Pakistan'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: The United States and the Failure of Nation
Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 320.

[18] Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 427.

[19] James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), 154, 160-63.

[20] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s
Trail (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 9. On December 4, 2001, Asia Times reported
that a convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi, was
also released from prison to participate in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (
http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CL04Df01.html); Scott, Road to 9/11, 125..

[21] Bernd Debusmann, "Obama and the Afghan Narco-state," Reuters, January
29th, 2009,
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/01/29/obama-and-the-afghan-narco-
state.

[22] Guardian, April 7, 2006, Independent, April 13, 2006, San Francisco Chronicle,
April 17, 2006.

[23] Independent (London), April 13, 2006; James Nathan, "Ending the Taliban's
money stream; U.S. should buy Afghanistan's opium," Washington Times, January 8,
2009.

[24] Afghanistan News, December 23, 2005,
http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2005/december/dec232005.html.

[25] Independent, March 9, 2009,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/former-warlord-to-fight-karzai-in-
afghanistan-polls-1640164.html#mainColumn. When Obama visited Afghanistan in
2008, Gul Agha Sherzai was the first Afghan leader he met. The London Observer
reported on July 21, 2002, that in order to secure his acceptance of the new Karzai
government, Gul Agha Sherzai, along with other warlords, had "been 'bought off'
with millions of dollars in deals brokered by US and British intelligence."

[26] Mark Corcoran, Australian Broadcasting Company, 2008,
http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/blog_mark.htm. "In an affidavit in his criminal case,
he traced a history of cooperating with U.S. officials, including the CIA, dating to
1990. In early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai said he
turned over to the U.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons, including "four
hundred anti-aircraft missiles of Russian, American and British manufacture" (Tom
Burghardt , "The Secret and (Very) Profitable World of Intelligence and
Narcotrafficking," DissidentVoice, January 2nd, 2009,
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/the-secret-and-very-profitable-world-of-
intelligence-and-narcotrafficking/. Cf. Risen, State of War, 165-66.

[27] USA Today, October 26, 2004.

[28] Washington Post, December 27, 2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122602099.html.

[29]
http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-
monitoring/Afghanistan_Opium_Survey_2008.pdf

[30] Philip Giraldi, "Found in Translation: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her
secrets," The American Conservative, January 28, 2008,
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/jan/28/00012/.

[31] E.g. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in
Western Europe (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005. 224-41; Martin A. Lee,
"Turkey's Drug-Terrorism Connection," ConsortiumNews, January 25, 2008,
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/012408a.html.

[32] Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror
Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 90-97: "While the ISI trained
Islamist insurgents and supplied arms, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, several Gulf states and
the Taliban funded them…Each month, an estimated 4-6 metric tons of heroin are
shipped from Turkey via the Balkans to Western Europe" (90, 96).

[33]Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and
Armies in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1998), x-xi.

[34] International Herald Tribune, January 25, 2009,
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2009/01/25/europe/OUKWD-UK-FINANCIAL-UN-
DRUGS.php. Cf. Daily Telegraph (London), January 26, 2009.

[35] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 16, 191.

[36] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 93, 431. After the final American withdrawal in 1975,
Laotian production continued to rise, thanks to the organizational efforts of Khun Sa,
a drug trafficker whom Thailand was relying on as protection against the Communists
in Burma and Vientiane. (McCoy, 428-31)

[37] Peter Dale Scott, ‘‘Honduras, the Contra Supportr t Networks, and Cocaine: How
the U.S. Government Has Augmented America’s Drug Crisis,’’ in Alfred W. McCoy and
Alan A. Block, eds., War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U. S. Narcotic Policy
(Boulder: Westview, 1992), 126 –27. I presented these remarks at a University of
Wisconsin conference.

[38] International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1999. Released by the Bureau
for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State,
Washington, D.C., March 2000,
www.state.gov/www/global/narcotics_law/1999_narc_report. Production has since
decreased, but is still well above 1990 levels.

[39] Richard Holbrooke, "Breaking the Narco-State." Washington Post, January 23,
2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202617.html.

[40] I use "jihadi salafism," an admittedly clumsy expression, in place of the more
frequently encountered "Islamism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" -- both of which
terms confer upon jihadi salafism a sense of legitimacy and long-time history which I
do not believe it deserves. The jihadi salafism I am talking about, with roots in
Wahhabism and Deobandism, can be seen as owing its spread in part to British and
American interference in India and the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden points to the
earlier example of Imam Taki al-Din ibn Taymiyyah in the thirteenth century, but ibn
Taymiyyah’s jihadism was in reaction to the Mongol ravaging of Baghdad in 1258. As
I have demonstrated elsewhere, history abundantly shows that "outside interventions
are likely if not certain, in any culture, to produce reactions that are violent,
xenophobic, and desirous of returning to a mythically pure past" (Scott, Road to
9/11, 260-61).

[41] Richard Holbrooke, "Breaking the Narco-State." Washington Post, January 23,
2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202617.html.

[42] Holbrooke, "Breaking the Narco-State."

[43] David Corn, "Holbrooke Calls for "Complete Rethink" of Drugs in Afghanistan,"
Mother Jones Mojo,

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/03/holbrooke-calls-complete-rethink-drugs-
afghanistan.

[44] "`By forced eradication we are often pushing farmers into the Taleban hands,’
Mr Holbrooke said. `We are going to try to reprogramme that money. About $160
million is for alternate livelihoods and we would like to increase that’" (London Times,
March 23, 2009,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5955860.ece).

[45] Guardian, March 24, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/24/richard-holbrooke-taliban-
afghanistan-hamid-karzai

[46] NewsHour, PBS, March 27, 2009,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june09/afghanpak_03-27.html. Cf.
Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 2009,
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/03/27/obamas-strategy-for-afghanistan-
and-pakistan/.

[47] "Obama's [May] 2009 [supplementary] war budget sheds light on the expansion
of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. …The Department of Defense states that
funding for the Afghanistan War will increase to $46.9 billion in 2009, a 31 percent
rise over the $35.9 billion in 2008 and the $32.6 billion in 2007… This $11.3 billion
increase includes an additional $2.8 billion for the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund,
$400 million for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund and $4.4 billion for
MRAPs designed for use in Afghanistan. Increased troop levels will also account for a
portion of the increase" (Jeff Leys, "Analyzing Obama's War Budget Numbers,"
Truthout, May 4, 2009, http://www.truthout.org/050409R?n).

[48] "Further Military Commitment in Afghanistan May Be Toughest Sell Yet," Fox
News, March 25, 2009,
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/03/25/military-commitment-
afghanistan-toughest-sell/. In a little-noted speech on October 17, 2008, Holbrooke
also predicted that the war in Afghanistan would become "the longest in American
history," surpassing even Vietnam (NYU School of Law News,
http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/HOLBROOKE_SPEECH).

[49] TheEndRun, April 6, 2009,
http://www.theendrun.com/2009/former-obama-advisor-and-cfr-vp-says-100000-
troops-needed/.

[50] RAND Corporation, "How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for Countering al
Qa'ida," Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008),
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html.

[51] Gilles Dorronsoro, "Focus and Exit: an Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War,"
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009,
http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf.

[52] Orange County Register, March 30, 2009,
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/afghanistan-military-qaida-2348209-president-
operations.

[53] "Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance," DefenseLink,
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289, emphasis added.

[54] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry
Holt, New York 2001; quoted in David Michael Smith, "The U.S. War in Afghanistan,"
The Canadian, April 19, 2006,
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2006/04/19/01181.html.
Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 169-70.

[55] Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2009,
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0408/p99s01-duts.html.

[56] Cf. "Holbrooke of South Asia," Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2009,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123940326797109645.html.

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research
Articles by Peter Dale Scott



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