In the Magazine section of the New York Times, on July 27, 2008, Thomas Schweich, a senior counternarcotics official for two years - deputy at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs under Anne Patterson, then assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs - writes that he discovered that "the Afghan government was deeply involved in protecting the opium trade" and that many of Karzai's supporters including Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, a former member of Afghanistan’s Parliament and ex-governor of the heroin capital of the world — Helmand Province — "finance themselves from the drug trade" and "senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade." NATO allies and America's own Defense Department have also "resisted the anti-opium offensive." In the fall of 2005 "Afghan farmers had planted almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of 165,000 hectares (637 square miles). The 2006 harvest would be the biggest narco-crop in history".
In January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade.
Thomas Schweich went to the White House in the first quarter of 2006 to brief Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condy Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others on the expanding opium problem and proposed a policy consisting of "public education about the evils of heroin and the illegality of cultivating poppies; alternative crops; eradication of poppy fields; interdiction of drug shipments and arrest of traffickers; and improvements to the judicial system." But Karzai "opposed "quick, fair and efficient " aerial eradication" in favor of "inefficient, costly, dangerous and more subject to corrupt dealings among local officials" ground-based eradication in which tractors and weed-whackers were used to destroy the poppy fields.
"Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission" writes Thomas Schweich, "A couple of weeks into the job", she was told by Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan that "drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan" because of Pentagon's strategy of “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business."
The Pentagon had promised the Drug Enforcement Administration Mi-17 helicopters and other equipment necessary for the training of the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan but its agents in Afghanistan "had seemingly unending difficulties" receiving them. "The Pentagon had reneged on a deal to allow the D.E.A. the use of precious ramp space at the Kabul airport" too. "Consequently, the effort to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers had stalled. Less than 1 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan was being seized there. The effort became even more complicated later in 2006, when Benjamin Freakley, the two-star U.S. general who ran the eastern front, shut down all operations by the D.E.A. and Afghan counternarcotics police in Nangarhar — a key heroin-trafficking province. The general said that antidrug operations were an unnecessary obstacle to his military operations".
"The Afghan anti-narcotics court" system set up by the Department of Justice was so corrupt that "dozens of reports" were received that "in the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked out the back door." The Pentagon-trained Afghan Army was so poorly trained that it used German-and-American-trained Afghan Police "to fill holes in the army mission" and "thrust" it "into a military role" and left them to lose "their lives trying to hold territory in dangerous areas."
As big as these challenges were, there were even bigger ones. "A lot of intelligence", write Schweich, "indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July 16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his candidacy for president. Karzai’s office said Sabit’s candidacy violated laws against political activity by officials...”)
Americans and Afghans were not the only ones who opposed antinarcotic efforts. "The British military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military" says Schweich. "British forces — centered in Helmand — actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort."
The result: By late 2006 poppy cultivation was increasingly concentrated and was becoming limited to the south of the country, where the Taliban insurgency was and remains the strongest and the Taliban are financing the insurgency there with drug money. In 2007, "the United States released photos of industrial-size poppy farms — many owned by pro-government opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers. Most of these narco-farms were near major southern cities. Farmers were digging wells, surveying new land for poppy cultivation, diverting U.S.-built irrigation canals to poppy fields and starting expensive reclamation projects." Schweich says claims that "at a lunch in Brussels in September 2006 attended by Habibullah Qaderi, who was then Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics. He gave a speech in which he said that poor Afghan farmers have no choice but to grow poppies, and asked for more money. A top European diplomat challenged him, holding up a U.N. map showing the recent trend: poppy growth decreasing in the poorest areas and growing in the wealthier areas. The minister, taken aback, simply reiterated his earlier point that Afghanistan needed more money for its destitute farmers. After the lunch, however, Qaderi approached me and whispered: “I know what you say is right. Poverty is not the main reason people are growing poppy. But this is what the president of Afghanistan tells me to tell others.”
When in July 2007, Schweich says, he breifed President Karzai on the drive for a new strategy and proposed a balance between "incentives with new disincentives" and discussed the need for "arrests of high-level traffickers and eradication of poppy fields in the wealthier areas of the Pashtun south, where Karzai had his roots and power base" Karzai "became sullen and unresponsive." Many of European countries, who had only one- or two-year legislative mandates to be in Afghanistan, "wanted to avoid any uptick in violence that would most likely result from an aggressive strategy, even if the strategy would result in long-term success. The myth gave military officers a reason to stay out of the drug war."
Schweich quotes from the Kabul Weekly editorial and the first vice president of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, who wrote an op-ed article in The Sunday Telegraph in London that how Afghan government is involved in drug business. The editorial said: “It is obvious that the Afghan government is more than kind to poppy growers." And Massoud wrote: “Millions of pounds have been committed in provinces including Helmand Province for irrigation projects and road building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport opium. . . . Deep-rooted corruption . . . exists in our state institutions.”
In frustration Schweich concludes that Karzai has played Americans "like a fiddle" and "the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term."
This is how Americans turned Afghanistan into a narco-state.
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