Pubdate: Sat, 11 Jul 2009
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2009 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Michael Byers
Note: Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global 
Politics and International Law at the University of B.C. He is a 
board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

THE POPPY PROBLEM KEEPS GROWING

A Lot More Canadians Are Likely To Die From Afghan Heroin Than To 
Perish On Afghan Soil

SEEDS OF TERROR: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda 
By Gretchen Peters

St. Martin's Press/ H.B. Fenn, 300 pages ($32.95)

Last November, I met a beautiful and cheerful young woman who was 
literally bursting with song. She was high on heroin, arms bruised 
from needle punctures, and so terribly thin that her pyjamas flapped 
as she danced through the vomit- and urine-stained halls of one of 
Vancouver's cheapest hotels.

By now, the young woman is probably dead -- one of the latest 
Canadian victims not just of the war on drugs, but also of the war in 
Afghanistan.

Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror is essential reading for anyone 
concerned about public policy in the drug, defence or diplomatic 
domains. The former ABC News reporter draws on decades of field 
experience, numerous interviews and secret government documents to 
demonstrate that opium -- not religious or political ideology -- 
poses the greatest challenge to the United States and NATO in 
Afghanistan today.

She traces the origins of the crisis to the United States' 
unqualified support for the mujahedeen in the 1980s. Focused on 
winning a proxy war against the Soviet Union, policymakers looked the 
other way as their local allies began to refine opium into heroin and 
smuggle it to Europe and North America.

A decade later, after the mujahedeen had morphed into the Taliban and 
taken power in Kabul, they continued to rely on heroin as a major 
source of income.

It might have been possible to close down the drug labs and smuggling 
routes during the first year or two of the U.S.-led occupation. But 
the Bush administration instead shifted its attention to Iraq, 
leaving only 10,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2002.

As Peters explains, this forced NATO commanders, short of boots on 
the ground, "to rely on aerial bombardments, killing hundreds of 
civilians and hardening the Afghan villagers against the West."

The mission was further compromised by a narrow focus on capturing or 
killing the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership. In late 2001, U.S. 
troops detained Haji Juma Khan, whom they knew to be a drug smuggler 
with ties to the Taliban. But when they realized that he couldn't 
lead them to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, they let him go.

Over the next seven years, Khan moved some $7 billion worth of opium 
to international markets.

According to Peters, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was 
concerned that Afghanistan "could turn into another costly drug war 
like Colombia" and rejected any engagement in counter-narcotics 
activities as "mission creep."

There are important similarities between the Taliban and Colombia's 
rebels, who go by the acronym FARC. Both groups began as an armed 
resistance to a corrupt government before evolving into a service 
agency for drug smugglers and international crime syndicates.

As Peters explains, heroin has transformed the Taliban into a 
"gangland-style grouping of tribal leaders, businessmen, regional 
warlords, and thugs." She surveyed 350 people involved in the drug 
trade along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: "Eight-one percent of 
respondents said the Taliban commanders' first priority was to make 
money, rather than to recapture territory and impose the strict brand 
of Islam they had espoused while in power."

Drug money has also enabled the Taliban to re-arm, recruit new 
members and expand its geographic reach. Today, much of southern 
Afghanistan is under de facto Taliban control.

The expanded Taliban influence facilitates the growing of even more 
poppies: More than 98 per cent of the 2008 crop came from insurgent-held areas.

Peters's principal concern is that the Taliban's involvement with 
heroin might enable its ally, al-Qaida, to strike U.S. territory with 
a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

Heroin is, of course, an insidious weapon of mass destruction itself. 
By 2007, Afghanistan accounted for a staggering 97 per cent of the 
global supply.

Cheap Afghan heroin has flooded into Vancouver on ships from China 
and India. The number of Canadian civilians dying as a result of 
Afghan heroin likely far exceeds the number of Canadian soldiers 
being killed on Afghan soil.

But destroying poppy fields in Afghanistan is not the answer. Peters 
explains that "wide-scale spraying would play into the hands of 
traffickers and terrorists" by driving up opium prices and thus 
increasing profit margins for drug dealers and the Taliban while 
making life even harder for Afghan farmers.

Nine years ago, the UN drug control program offered the Taliban $250 
million to stop the cultivation of poppies. The Taliban agreed and 
was able to reduce the acreage planted with poppies by more than 90 
per cent. However, the Taliban leadership also bought and stockpiled 
huge stores of opium before imposing the ban, selling it after prices 
had increased tenfold.

At the same time, "the poppy ban sparked a humanitarian disaster" for 
Afghan farmers, hundreds of thousands of whom defaulted on loans, 
sold off their land and livestock and fled to Pakistan.

Paying Afghan farmers to grow other crops is not the answer, either. 
In 2003, after the British introduced a $140-million crop 
substitution program, more Afghan farmers planted poppies in order to 
become eligible for being paid to switch crops the following year.

Eight years after 9/11, Peters argues that "the single greatest 
failure in the war on terror is not that Osama bin Laden continues to 
elude capture, or that the Taliban has staged a comeback, or even 
that al Qaeda is regrouping in Pakistan's tribal areas and probably 
planning fresh attacks on the West." Rather, "it's the spectacular 
incapacity of western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money 
that is keeping their networks afloat."

She advocates military action, including air strikes against heroin 
labs and drug-smuggling convoys and the targeted killing of upper- 
and mid-level traffickers. At the same time, she advocates 
negotiations with the Taliban and concedes that "defeating the 
insurgency and the drug trade will now take years, maybe decades of 
sustained investment and effort."

There is no denying that drug money, terrorism and technology are a 
potentially catastrophic mix. But Peters arrives at her military 
solution after only the briefest consideration of its possible 
limitations. For instance, although she identifies the parallel 
between Afghanistan and Colombia, she makes no attempt to assess 
whether the use of military force against drug traffickers has 
succeeded in the South American country.

Nor does she mention the concerns some NATO governments have 
expressed over targeting criminals, rather than combatants, with air strikes.

She dismisses a much-discussed alternative approach -- that of 
purchasing Afghan opium for medicinal use -- with the unconvincing 
argument that the demand for morphine has already been met. This is 
not the case in the developing world.

Peters also fails to mention the most radical and perhaps sensible 
policy alternative of all. Civil libertarians argue that legalizing 
drugs (and regulating and taxing them) would be more effective and, 
ultimately, less harmful, than futilely trying to eliminate them 
through force of arms.

These disagreements aside, there is one more reason why this is a 
must-read book: Peters has apparently succeeded in convincing Barack 
Obama, because many of her policy prescriptions have been adopted by him.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom