REVEALED
Geopolitics, Profit, and Poppies: How the CIA Turned Afghanistan into a
Failed Narco-State
The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin
America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization
of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.
by Alan Macleod
June 25th, 2021
By Alan Macleod
AFGHANISTAN - The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many
industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that
the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is
still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy
cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped
off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the
world's illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More
land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca
production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said
to directly employ around half a million people.
This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and
largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA
launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen
militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over
the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the
ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups,
including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such
atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.
"From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was
little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s," Professor Alfred
McCoy, author of "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade," told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium
production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon
dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would
travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the
brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on
streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s - Jeffrey
St. Clair, co-author of "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press," alleges -
heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.
"In order to finance the resistance for a protracted period, the Mujahideen
had to come up with a livelihood beyond the weapons that the CIA was
providing," McCoy said, noting that the weapons issued could not feed the
fighters' families, nor reimburse them for lost labor:
So what the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan
had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990,
at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium - 100
tons per annum - had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was
already about 75% of the world's illicit opium trade."
The CIA achieved its goal of giving the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam, the Soviets
failing to quash the Mujahideen rebellion by the time they finally pulled
out in 1989. But American money and weapons also turned Afghanistan into a
dangerously unstable place full of warring factions that used opium to fund
their battles for internal supremacy. By 1999, annual production had risen
to 4,600 tons. The Taliban eventually emerged as the dominant force in the
country and attempted to gain international legitimacy by stamping out the
trade.
In this, they were remarkably successful. A 2000 ban on opium cultivation by
the Taliban-led government led to an almost overnight drop to just 185 tons
harvested the following year, as frightened farmers chose not to risk
attracting their wrath.
The Taliban had hoped that the eradication program would win favor in
Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But
unfortunately, history had other ideas. On September 11, 2001, the U.S.
experienced a massive case of blowback, as Bin Laden's forces launched
attacks on New York and Washington. The U.S. ignored the Taliban's offer to
hand him over to a third party, instead opting to invade the country. Less
than a month after the planes hit the World Trade Center, U.S. troops were
patrolling the fields of Afghanistan.
The world's first true narco-state
The effect of the occupation was to expand drug production to unprecedented
new proportions, Afghanistan becoming, in Professor McCoy's estimation, the
world's first true narco-state. McCoy notes that by 2008, opium was
responsible for well over half of the country's gross domestic product. By
comparison, even in Colombia's darkest days, cocaine accounted for only 3%
of its GDP.
Today, the United Nations estimates that around 6,300 tons of opium (and
rising) is produced yearly, with 224,000 hectares - an area almost the size
of Rhode Island - planted with poppy fields.
Afhganistan Opium production graph
Source | Dyfed Loesche | Statista
But even while it was financing a widespread and deadly aerial spraying
campaign in Colombia, the United States refused to countenance the same
policy in Afghanistan. "We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only
source of income of people who live in the second poorest country in the
world without being able to provide them with an alternative," said NATO
spokesman James Appathurai.
Not everyone agreed, however, that a passionate commitment to defending the
quality of life of the poorest was the actual reason for rejecting the
policy. Matthew Hoh, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps is one
skeptic. Hoh told MintPress that airborne fumigation was not carried out
because it would be outside the control of Afghan government officials, who
were deeply implicated in the drug trade, owning poppy fields and production
plants themselves. "They were afraid that, if they went to aerial
eradication, the U.S. pilots would just eradicate willy nilly and a lot of
their own poppy fields would be hit." In 2009, Hoh resigned in protest from
his position at the State Department in Zabul Province over the government's
continued occupation of Afghanistan. He told MintPress:
NATO forces were more or less guarding poppy fields and poppy production,
under the guise of counterinsurgency. The logic was 'we don't want to take
away the livelihoods of the people.' But really, what we were doing at that
point was protecting the wealth of our friends in power in Afghanistan. "
According to Hoh, there was widespread disillusionment within the military
among service members who had to risk their lives on a day to day basis.
"What are we doing here? This is bullshit," was a common sentiment among the
rank and file.
U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. James K. Peters stands in an opium poppy field while
performing a foot patrol at Sangin, Afghanistan, May 19, 2011. (U.S. Marine
Corps photo by Cpl. Jeremy C. Harris/Released)
A US Marine stands in a poppy field during a foot patrol at Sangin,
Afghanistan. Photo | DVIDS
The heroin trade implicated virtually everyone in power, including Afghan
President Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali, among the biggest and most
notorious drug kingpins in the south of the country, a man widely understood
to be in the pay of the CIA.
U.S. attempts to stymie the opium trade, such as the policy of paying
domestic militias to destroy poppy fields, often backfired. Locals came up
with ways of profiting, such as refraining from planting in one area,
collecting large sums of money from occupying forces, and using that cash to
plant elsewhere - effectively getting paid both to plant and not to plant.
Even worse, local warlords and drug bosses would destroy their rivals' crops
and collect money from the U.S. for doing so, leaving themselves both
enriched and in a stronger position than before, having gained NATO forces'
favor.
One notable example of this is local strongman Gul Agha Sherzai, who
eradicated his competitors' crops in Nangarhar Province (while quietly
leaving his own in Kandahar Province untouched). But all the U.S. saw was a
local politician seemingly committed to stamping out an illegal drug trade.
They therefore showered him with money and other privileges. "We literally
gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition," Hoh said.
"If you were going to write a movie about this, they'd say 'This is too far
fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.'
But that is the way it is."
McCoy noted that the Taliban was one of the prime beneficiaries of the drug
trade, and used it to increase their power and vanquish the U.S.:
That booming opium production, and the U.S. failure to curb it, provided the
bulk of the financing for Taliban, who captured a significant but unknown
share of the local profits from the drug traffic, which they used to fund
guerrilla operations over the past 20 years, becoming a determinative factor
in the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan."