Pubdate: Thu, 04 Oct 2001
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2001 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Bill Wallace

DRUGS FUEL TERROR CAMPAIGN

Opium Trade Keeps Taliban In Business, Experts Charge

An important battle in the U.S.-led war on terrorism will be combatting a 
lucrative heroin trade that supports key terrorist groups.

Cutting that opium lifeline will require an intensive campaign aimed not 
only at the terrorists, experts say, but also at criminal organizations in 
Central Asia and Eastern Europe that are closely allied with them.

The principal source of most of the world's opium is Afghanistan, the 
fundamentalist Islamic stronghold that shelters Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, 
the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon.

But Afghanistan is not the only Central Asian state overflowing with drugs. 
Between 1993 and this year, Russian security services on the Tajik-Afghan 
border seized 10 tons of opium and heroin, of which about 2 metric tons 
were pure heroin -- enough to give every U.S. resident a dose and still 
have 114 million hits left over.

The Russian government says that in Tajikistan and other Central Asian 
republics, drug trafficking has become a primary source of funds for 
Islamic resistance groups.

Opium is a major income source for Afghanistan's cash-strapped Taliban 
government, which has been receiving $20 million to $25 million a year from 
a tax on poppy production, according to Charles Diaz, a drug policy 
consultant to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

The U.S. State Department says the opium tax is used to support a panoply 
of fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organizations that train or are based 
in Afghanistan.

Diaz told The Chronicle that the Taliban protect opium production and 
smuggling routes and also have direct, hands-on involvement in drug 
trafficking because "instead of getting paid in cash, they get paid in 
product, which is the drug itself.

"Of course, they can't just sit on the heroin," Diaz said. "They have to 
get rid of it by converting it to something they can use, such as money, 
arms or some other material." That means the Taliban must sell some of 
Afghanistan's drugs, he said.

TIES TO DRUG TRADE FEARED

Some experts suspect that bin Laden's al Qaeda network -- and other 
Afghan-based terrorist organizations such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the 
Army of Mohammed and the Army of the Righteous -- may also be directly 
involved in the drug trade.

"It seems quite likely that al Qaeda and Islamic opposition groups in the 
Central Asian republics may be involved in trafficking and possibly 
refining," said Alison Jamieson, a specialist on transnational crime and a 
former consultant to the U.N.'s global drug control program.

Bin Laden considers heroin a weapon in his holy war. Diaz notes that he 
"has talked about going after the West by coming up with a new, more potent 
strain of heroin and getting it into Europe or the United States to 
undermine them."

Although direct evidence of drug trafficking by al Qaeda is scant, there is 
little question that bin Laden's network has opened its bases to terrorists 
and insurgents with documented ties to the heroin trade.

One of these groups is the Kosovo Liberation Army, which engaged in 
bombings during its war against Yugoslav government forces in the Balkans. 
It has been identified as a heroin trafficker by law enforcement agencies 
and intelligence services.

The KLA includes Islamic extremists who have trained in al Qaeda camps 
inside Afghanistan, U.S. and foreign intelligence services say.

Another drug-dealing terror organization connected to bin Laden is the 
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

"According to some estimations, IMU may be responsible for 70 percent of 
the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the (Central Asian) 
area," German Interpol official Ralf Mutschke told the House Judiciary 
Committee last December.

Law enforcement sources say heroin-dealing Islamic radicals allied with bin 
Laden in Chechnya have ties to the Chechen Mafia, part of the Russian 
underworld that operates in 29 countries, including the United States.

MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL ALLIANCE

The Kosovo, Uzbek and Chechen connections point to an ominous fact: The 
drug trade results in alliances of convenience between Islamic terrorists 
and organized crime groups in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Whether the 
militants smuggle drugs themselves or simply "tax" the drug syndicates that 
operate in their areas, the result is a mutually beneficial alliance.

The organized crime connections of bin Laden allies such as the KLA and the 
Chechen insurgents is troubling, said James Phillips, a research fellow 
specializing in international relations for the conservative Heritage 
Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"The Chechen Mafia is known to deal in all kinds of Russian contraband, 
including guns, nuclear materials and chemical and biological weapons," 
Phillips said. "Bin Laden has made it clear he would like nothing more than 
to have those kinds of weapons to use against the West."

To cut off the heroin lifeline to Central Asian terrorists, experts say, 
two things are required. One is to aggressively pursue the entire network 
involved in the trafficking, including terrorists, criminal organizations 
and host governments such as the Taliban that offer them a haven.

"You have to drain the swamp to get rid of the alligators, and that means 
you can't simply go after bin Laden," Phillips said. "You have to eliminate 
the Taliban, an administration that is willing to export drugs and terror 
and that is willing to stand by and let others do it."

However, even eliminating the Taliban may not be enough to stop the Afghan 
heroin trade. The largest group fighting the Taliban for control of 
Afghanistan -- and a likely member of any replacement coalition government 
there -- is the Northern Alliance, which itself sells heroin to support its 
insurgency.

As a consequence, the second necessity is to attack the economic conditions 
that make dealing drugs such an attractive economic option to farmers in 
some of the poorest areas in the world.

U.S. PAID TALIBAN TO FIGHT DRUGS

To date, such efforts have had mixed success. For example, the United 
States gave $43 million to the Taliban this year to support drug 
eradication in return for a Taliban pledge to eliminate Afghanistan's 
massive opium crop.

U.N observers say the Taliban followed through on their pledge by virtually 
wiping out opium production in the parts of Afghanistan they control. But 
U.S. officials say the ban had little effect on trafficking because the 
Taliban didn't eliminate big opium stockpiles from previous years or stop 
traffickers.

At a briefing for the House Government Reform subcommittee on drugs 
yesterday, U.S. drug officials said the Taliban now appear to be dumping 
those stockpiles on the market, and the price of heroin in Europe dropped 
from $746 a kilogram to $95 immediately after the U.S. terror attacks.

The subcommittee's chairman, Mark Souder, R-Ind., called the Taliban's 
opium cultivation prohibition "a coldly calculated ploy to control the 
world market price for their opium and heroin."
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