Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
[The author looks back to the 1970s, when the Afghans had some success with agricultural exports other than heroin, and suggests a goal of returning to the 1970s; she ignores the facts that in the 1970s there was no competition from China and India (both had economies hobbled by government restrictions), transportation from the Far East was much more expensive, and the Internet was not available in China, India, and a variety of Asian countries with highly educated citizens.]
The author’s conclusion is that we need dramatic changes in our strategy. It is not sufficient to destroy poppy crops with aerial spraying. We need to imprison the chemists who turn poppy into heroin. We need to build up the Afghan economy so that its illiterate farmers will find it more profitable to grow something other than poppy. We need to reform the corrupt government, starting with the president’s brother, who is apparently a big heroin dealer himself.
This made me ask whether it is reasonable to assume limits to U.S. power. Suppose that we succeed in imprisoning all chemists and shutting down all drug labs. Given a supply of poppy and a market for heroin, aren’t there some sufficiently enterprising Afghans who could learn to make heroin? Can we build up the Afghan economy so that people can find better jobs than being a drug dealer? We haven’t succeeded in building up the U.S. economy to that extent; there are plenty of U.S. residents who have chosen drug dealing over other careers. Could we make the Afghan police so effective that they can find and successfully prosecute 100 percent of drug dealers? We haven’t done that with our own police. Can we fix their corrupt government? Our own government just handed out $2 trillion to various cronies.
When planning an overseas adventure, would it make sense to break the project down into small tasks and ask “Can Americans do this?” Let’s consider aerial spraying. That is equivalent to asking the questions “Can an American fly an airplane?”; “Can an American sit in an airplane and identify a poppy field?”; “Can an American purchase some Roundup from Monsanto?’; “Can an American pilot release the Roundup on top of the poppy field?”
The answers to all of these questions is plainly “yes” and in many cases these are things that Americans have 100 years of experience doing. The author of Seeds of Terror dismisses aerial spraying as ineffective, but at least we can be confident that it is doable. An effective strategy that requires us to do things that we can’t do is more like a dream than a workable plan.
Had we broken down our Iraq and Afghanistan projects into tasks of this size, we probably would have found a lot of “no” answers and that would have been a warning that we needed to plan something different and simpler.
One radical alternative is to follow Portugal’s example, and decriminalize heroin:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Healthcare for addicts is cheaper than policing. Foreign terrorists and local criminal organizations would both lose revenue.
To the question, “can Americans do this?,” we might also want to add, “can we pay for our overseas adventure with valuables extracted from our target country?” It’s amazing that we’ll go into Iraq under the pretense of ferreting out and destroying weapons of mass destruction, but then once we’re there we won’t take enough oil from Iraq to pay for the adventure. Clearly the majority of the world thinking we shouldn’t be in Iraq wasn’t a deterrent to us going, so why should the majority of the world thinking we’re stealing oil bother us?
As for the heroin/poppy side of our Afghan adventure, I’ve never understood why we keep trying out various forms of drug prohibition any way. It seems so much smarter just to legalize them all, tax them for revenue, and then introduce basically the same laws we already have for driving drunk to cover the new legalized drugs. You want to shoot up smack? Great! Make sure you don’t drive while you’re high, make sure you stay out of public places when you’re high, make sure you’re over 21, etc. Why spend money trying to enforce drug policies elsewhere that we can’t successfully enforce here? Why not encourage poppy production in Afghanistan and then take our cut of the drug trade to help pay for the adventure?
Am I a terrorist for pointing out that the bulk of the money being made is at the distribution endpoints, which are all handled by Americans (or at least people living in America)?
Look back at history – who profited from the opium trade and what led to the Anglo-Chinese War (also known as the Opium Wars)?
Someone, somewhere, is making a boatload of money selling heroin to rich Westerners. It ain’t the Afghanis!
“The author of Seeds of Terror dismisses aerial spraying as ineffective, but at least we can be confident that it is doable.”
I don’t understand — are you saying that, even though aerial spraying is ineffective, we should continue doing it because it’s the only thing we are capable of doing? We are also capable of sending in two hundred people to stand on their heads on the side of the road to Kabul, but since that would have no effect on the drug trade and hence no effect on limiting terrorists’ funds, it would be a waste of time and money.
Instead of doing something that has been proven ineffective (ie, it doesn’t work, ie, we are wasting our time doing it), why don’t we work on building our capabilities in areas that would be effective? Unless the real goal is just to FEEL like we’re working toward a goal, in which case, aerial spraying sounds perfect.
In the 80s the mujahideen used heroin to great effect in destroying Russian military personnel’s combat worthiness. There’s no reason to believe US armed forces are more immune than the Russians to the blandishments of heroin peddlers (quite the opposite, in fact).
Afghanistan is self-sufficient in food production and could in fact find export markets in neighboring Central Asian republics like Tadjikistan or Uzbekistan. Afghan dried apricots are highly esteemed in India, one very traditional dish in my parents’ family is a Qubani-ka-meetha, a sort of dried apricot stew with cream.
Obviously, opium is much more lucrative than food crops. Any efforts towards eradication will reduce supply, make prices explode and paradoxically make the crop all the more profitable. Much of the Karzai government is actively involved in the drug trade, which would explain why they steadfastly refuse crop spraying. Then again, the human health side-effect of the crop spraying efforts in Colombia are horrific, and the Afghans are well justified in their rejection of it. Given our dismal record on intelligence gathering, in all likelihood, crop eradication would be manipulated by our warlord “allies” to take out the competition’s fields, just as the US conveniently delivered bombs to order on our pet warlords’ enemies’ wedding parties in the early days of the war.
As for drug dealers in the US, only the top of the hierarchy benefits – the average drug dealer makes less than minimum wage and would do better to just flip burgers at McD. There is a twisted version of the American Dream at work, where every lowly street hustler believes he has a chance to become kingpin (notwithstanding the dismal statistics and the limited life expectancy of any who would in fact achieve such a lofty position).
Elizabeth: I am not advocating aerial spraying or any other approach in Afghanistan since I am not an expert on the country. I would like to see the menu of things on which we spend taxpayer money limited to things that Americans can do. Spraying seems like something we could do. Legalization of heroin in consumer countries (and insistence that poppies come from domestic or friendly sources) is something we could do. The “reform every institution in Afghan society” plan proposed in Seeds of Terror does not seem like something we can do and yet it is apparently closest to what the U.S. government is currently attempting.
Fazal: The theory that poppy spraying in Afghanistan will drive up poppy prices and make every Afghan infinitely rich would make sense if Afghanistan were the only place in the world growing poppies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_poppy says that, in fact, many countries around the world grow opium poppies. Instead of paying an Afghan farmer $1 billion for the last unsprayed poppy plant, a drug lab could pay farmers in some other country for their poppies. As long as the alternative supplier country is not also home to an Al-Qaeda-like group, the result would be a reduction in the kinds of Muslim attacks on U.S. interests that we are supposedly trying to stop with our operation in Afghanistan.
Many countries grow Poppies, but some for legal purposes. The wikipedia page on Heroin is more informative, and includes a map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HeroinWorld-en.svg
Spraying in Afghanistan would only move the problem.
Daniel: Thanks for the link. Yes, spraying poppy fields in Afghanistan would “move the problem” of heroin production to Vietnam or Laos. And that would be a great thing for the U.S. because people in Vietnam and Laos don’t spend their spare cash on killing Americans. We didn’t send our military to Afghanistan with the goal of ending heroin production. We sent them there to stop Muslim attacks on the U.S. If heroin production in Afghanistan is funding terrorism, as chronicled by the author of Seeds of Terror, moving all heroin production to the Golden Triangle would be a useful achievement (though arguably not as useful as ending all heroin production or reforming Afghan society and economy).
philg: How many Afghans have ever been involved in terror attacks against the U.S.? I think you’ll find the answer is zero. And while it’s blatantly obvious that the Taliban is funded by drug money, the author herself, despite a strong incentive to link the two, admits that there is only circumstantial evidence that al-Qaeda is benefiting from it. Most others seem to think they’re funded mostly directly by donations from believers:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/al-qaida-funding.htm
Be it either way, legalization is the only way to bring opium profits back to earth; you don’t hear about tobacco growers or breweries bankrolling rebels or terrorists.
jpatokal: Ouch! Now you’ve really touched a nerve. It would be painful to think that 100 percent of our tax dollars spent in Afghanistan were being wasted, but I guess that is perfectly possible. Mostly the part of the book that horrified me was the idea that the U.S. taxpayer should now be responsible for nation-building in Afghanistan.
Another solution would be to legalise drugs. Legal and free market availabilty of drugs would seem like a boom time for the drug cartels, until you realise who they would be competing against Glaxosmithkline and some of the most powerful companies in the world.
Sure the drug warlords can out-spend and out-gun or police and border patrols, but could they compete with the might of a $100 billion company?
We’d still have to deal with the problem of ecomonic development of Afganistan, but at least there wouldn’t be an internal power struggle to fight at the same time.
jpatokal: If the Taliban are financed in some significant measure by the heroin trade, and if Al Qaida’s operations in that region are supported in some significant measure by the Taliban, then Al Qaida benefits indirectly (but possibly significantly) from the heroin trade.
I’m inclined to think that decriminalizing drugs in the U.S is a good step, though, and not just with respect to Islamicist terrorism.
I must confess to owning Elizabeth’s book, but not actually having read it yet.
That said I will wade in and suggest that perhaps we might restrict key ingredients of the refining process of which HCl (Hydrochloric Acid) is one. Surely targeted sanctions on key materials is a low-cost, low-risk means to restrict the drug cartels, and one that does not involve the killing of innocent Afghan civilians or US/UK/NATO soldiers.
On a unrelated note, I’d draw anyone’s interest to Martin Armstrong’s latest piece on the failing of the Roman Empire. This will be DEPRESSINGLY FAMILIAR to anyone following the bailout machinations and media lies of the current economic situation.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17880556/How-ALL-Systems-Can-Collapse-Overnight-709
It’s also a fascinating and very colorful read for anyone with even a passing interest in history, and how it can repeat.