Opium for the Masses

During the last few weeks of anthrax hysteria, a dozen or so U.S. reporters have pursued a more difficult, taboo story: opium's role as the centerpiece of Afghanistan's economy. That cursed country was already a place where children helped to harvest the gum from the poppies, working people kept opium in their homes rather than money in the bank, and the Taliban raked in up to $50 million a year in drug taxes. But post-September 11, Taliban leaders lifted a ban on their bestselling crop, and the growers and dealers have been conducting business as usual. On the tail of smart pieces in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, The New York Times ran a solid version of the story on October 22.

The best of these stories note that the careening wartime economy has spurred Afghan civilians to re-embrace the drug trade. Farmers are tilling the fields to prepare for the winter crop, chemists are setting up labs in caves and the backs of trucks, and family men are risking their freedom to sneak heroin across the border. As the Taliban dumps an estimated 4000 tons of stockpiled opium on the world market, the Northern Alliance continues to export a hefty share through Tajikistan into Russia and beyond. Experts fear that, in the absence of "nation-building" efforts, the trade will flourish long after the U.S. installs a new government in Kabul.

The rising tide of Afghan opium, heroin, and hashish is a potential disaster. But as the Times' Tim Golden pointed out, the U.S. has long neglected the drug war in that region. Last week, a DEA spokesperson told the Voice that his agency has no access to Afghanistan. Asked about published reports that the U.S. military intends to target stockpiles, heroin labs, and poppy fields in Afghanistan, a Pentagon spokesperson called the reports "pure speculation."

"Our quarrel is with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the terrorists and the governments that support them," said the Pentagon source. "The drug trafficking business has been a problem in Afghanistan for a while, and it's an issue that the new government will have to address with the international community."

The Times paints the drug scene in Afghanistan as a casualty of U.S. neglect, but it's also possible our government has decided that an uncontrolled drug trade is an acceptable form of collateral damage in this particular war. If so, it won't be the first time. During the 1980s, when the U.S. paid the mujahideen guerrillas to fight the Soviet invasion, the CIA famously turned a blind eye to the drug trade, and within a few short years, Afghanistan came out of nowhere to become the world's second-largest opium grower, after Myanmar. While most of the heroin sold in the U.S. now arrives from Colombia and Mexico, during the 1980s Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied more than half the U.S. market.

On October 7, the Los Angeles Times published a front-pager that suggested a direct causal relationship between war and the drug trade. Reporting from Islamabad, the Times' John Daniszewski noted that "drugs thrive in a war culture, because warlords need the money from such illicit sales to buy weapons, and growers and smugglers need an environment of lawlessness to operate without fear of the police." Without implicating the U.S., Daniszewski also reported that the Soviet invasion in 1979 led to "a two-decade drug bonanza" that gave the Taliban the resources to take over Afghanistan.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune on September 30, Islamabad-based Tom Hundley probed a little deeper, noting that during the 1980s, CIA director William Casey embraced the opium trade as a means to finance his covert war in Afghanistan. Translation: The Afghan fundamentalists may be drug lords, but they're our drug lords. They learned to trade drugs for arms 20 years ago, with the tacit approval of the CIA.