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 | | From: | Dan Clore | | Subject: | The Afghan "Dark Alliance" | | Date: | Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:42:38 -0800 |
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 | News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
The Afghan 'Dark Alliance'
By Bill Weinberg, Pacific News Service
Posted on January 12, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20972/
On Jan. 6, a soldier from Afghanistan's nascent national
army was killed, along with two assailants, when troops were
sent in to eradicate an opium field in Uruzgan province. The
central government of President Hamid Karzai recognizes that
these could prove the opening shots of a new opium war. A
month earlier, on Dec. 11, Karzai's finance minister, Ashraf
Ghani, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times,
"Where Democracy's Greatest Enemy Is a Flower," pleading for
international support for crop-substitution programs. Opium
is the key to power for Afghanistan's warlords, who still
control much of the country.
It would be impolitic for Karzai's government to remind his
U.S. underwriters of Washington's own complicity in creating
this reality. The apparent December suicide of Gary Webb,
the journalist responsible for the "Dark Alliance" sensation
in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, sparked at least a
brief media recollection of the contra-cocaine claims of the
Reagan era. That a CIA-backed rebel army was also turning to
the drug trade at that same time in Afghanistan seems almost
entirely forgotten.
Webb's controversial series documented the links between the
CIA-spawned "contra" guerrilla army in Nicaragua and a top
California cocaine ring. The series was met by a campaign to
discredit it by major media, which relentlessly trumpeted
its real flaws. But whatever Webb's failings, the Nicaraguan
counter-revolution was a major player in the 1980s coke
boom. In 1989, the congress of Nicaragua's neighbor Costa
Rica permanently barred Lt. Col. Oliver North, ex-National
Security Advisor John Poindexter, the U.S. ambassador and
CIA station chief from the country's territory, finding that
their contra re-supply operation had doubled as a cocaine
ring. Such disturbing realities were forgotten as Webb's
work was dismissed as "conspiracy theory."
Even more forgotten is that the contra-coke connection was
mirrored in an Afghan mujahedeen-heroin connection. Just as
the CIA groomed an army of right-wing exiles to destabilize
revolutionary Nicaragua, the agency turned to Islamic
insurgents to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Once
again, the CIA proxy army turned to the drug trade to boost
its war chest. And while Nicaragua has seen some
reconciliation since the 1980s, Afghanistan is still
violently divided -- and under U.S. occupation.
Moreover, the contra war was small potatoes compared to the
Afghan campaign, which never received nearly as much media
exposure. All told, the CIA sunk some $450 million into the
contras, compared with over $2 billion for mujahedeen.
In a 1988 series for the Philadelphia Inquirer, "The CIA's
Leaking Pipeline," Tim Weiner found that weapons for the
Afghan resistance were being diverted to the armies of opium
lords. The CIA admitted one of every five dollars in war
material bound for the mujahedeen "disappeared." It was
during the mujahedeen war that the Afghan-Pakistan "Golden
Crescent" overtook Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" as the
top source of global heroin.
This didn't slow down the Reagan administration. Following a
1986 bid by CIA director William Casey, Congress approved
Pentagon advisors and hundreds of Stinger missiles for the
mujahedeen.
Support for the mujahedeen led directly to the emergence of
al Qaeda. In 1984, Osama bin Laden arrived in Peshawar, the
Pakistan border city then serving as the mujahedeen's
staging area, and trans-shipment point for their heroin. It
was there he established his Maktab al-Khidmat ("services
center"), or MAK, a clearinghouse for mujahedeen volunteers
from the Arab world, where they were armed, indoctrinated
and dispatched to the front. CIA money flowed into the MAK
through Pakistan's secret service. Osama assumed command of
the MAK in 1989, the same year the Soviets pulled out of
Afghanistan. He quickly transformed the MAK into his al
Qaeda network of trained terrorists.
Given the extreme Islamic fundamentalist ideology of the
mujahedeen, it was only logical that they would turn their
guns on their erstwhile American underwriters after the
Russians were driven out. When the Taliban took power in
1996, pledging to restore order after years of war,
Afghanistan became a staging ground for global terrorist
operations -- culminating in 9/11, and the U.S.-led
occupation that continues today.
Now "liberated" Afghanistan has become again the world's top
heroin producer, supplying an estimated 90 percent of the
global market, according to the United Nations, which
monitors world production via satellite. Opium cultivation
has in fact skyrocketed since the fall of the puritanical
Taliban, which had effectively if briefly suppressed the
trade. Growers have repeatedly opened fire on government
workers sent to eradicate their fields. Any effort by
President Karzai to challenge the opium economy could
antagonize the warlords and plunge the country back into
civil war, making Bush's victory in this ravaged land a
Pyrrhic one.
America will be dealing with the legacy of Afghanistan's
Dark Alliance for years to come. It is sad that Gary Webb's
passing has prompted more dismissive condescension than
serious grappling.
http://www.alternet.org/story/20972/
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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