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." - --- MAP posted-by: Rebel