War On Drugs And War On Terror |
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| Although a 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade center came dangerously close to succeeding, the implied warning was -- for whatever reasons -- largely ignored. Beyond that, if anyone in a position of responsibility thought to link the audaciously selected target to a wide open side door -- America's vast, but lightly defended domestic airline network -- the connection was neither made publicly nor acted upon. On September 11, a brilliantly conceived suicide attack on the Twin Towers, using highjacked airliners as fuel-laden bombs, was executed flawlessly, causing as-yet undefined damage to our economy at a critical juncture in history. To add insult to serious injury, a more symbolic second attack. using the same tactics against the icon of America's defense establishment in Washington DC, was at least 50% successful. |
| This is not a critique of the security lapses that allowed those devastating attacks; rather, it's an attempt to place the attacks themselves in perspective so they can be responsibly analyzed. It's clear from expectations of "war" being sustained in our media that we may be poised to compound our problems by failing to recognize that some major policy errors helped enable their development. |
| Terrorism is a weapon classically used by zealots united by shared grievances and outgunned by conventional forces. Although often state sponsored or encouraged, it's not a weapon that can be openly employed by governments seeking formal recognition from other nations. To rise to the level of a serious threat, terrorism, like any other complex human activity, requires funding. In that connection, kidnapping, extortion, and bank robbery have all been employed by various terrorist organizations; another funding vehicle for terrorists has become participation in -- or the ability to tax -- illegal drug markets within their areas of control. |
| A look at today's "source countries" for illegal drugs, illustrates the mutual affinities of terrorists, rogue governments, and participants in illegal drug markets. Traditional drugs are based on crops that must be grown, harvested, and processed. Suppliers require a suitable climate, a large territory in which to operate, and a peasant population willing to work at near subsistence levels. Local government must either be ineffective, complicit, or both. That such conditions can be found in all major drug producing nations from Colombia to Burma is clearly not an accident; if we look closely, we can also understand how the illegal markets themselves tend to produce those pernicious conditions by favoring the emergence of a controlling criminal class with the ability to corrupt government, murder opposition, and coopt the local peasantry by paying more for illegal crops than for staples. They can easily afford to do so because of the huge profit margins created by drug prohibition. |
| The ultimate noxious effect of such markets is well illustrated in the smaller nations which are now the world's prime producers of illegal drugs: Burma, Afghanistan and Colombia. All have stagnant economies because foreign investment has been driven away; larger bordering nations (Mexico and Pakistan and Thailand) also have extreme difficulty in attracting foreign capital for legitimate enterprises as a result of their inevitable participation in illegal drug markets through processing, trans shipment, and distribution. |
| As the domestic American policy of drug prohibition gradually became globalized after WW2, the illegal markets dependent on our policy have thrived. The milestones are familiar; the Single Convention Treaty of New York (1961), promulgated by the UN, made the same drugs illegal around the world; the discovery of marijuana and psychedelics by American youth in the Sixties added impetus for further growth, and the "war on drugs" declared by Nixon and expanded by every president since Reagan has been accompanied by relentless increase in that fraction of the world's gross domestic product flowing into illegal drug markets. While that share can't be measured with the same precision as with legitimate markets, it was recently estimated by the UN to be 8-9%, rivalling petroleum products and motor vehicles. |
| It can be appreciated, at least in retrospect, that Muslim outrage over America's sponsorship and support of Israel coupled with the gradual expansion of illegal drug markets in the Middle East made the current alliance between Islamic terrorism and drug supplying nations almost inevitable. What might have originally been in doubt -- which specific nations would become leaders in drug production -- has since been defined by specific events. |
| All the nations from the Eastern Mediterranean to Pakistan have been drug producers at one time or another, but Afghanistan did not emerge as a major source of opium for world heroin markets until after 1979 when the Soviet Union attempted to establish a puppet government. |
| While it is claimed that the CIA had a lot to do with that development, it's not our purpose to examine that claim; simply to note that by 1992, when the Taliban first came to power, Afghanistan had become the world leader in opium production and conversely, opium was their major source of foreign exchange. Also, Pakistan, a traditional American ally against the Soviet Union, had become increasingly sucked into the global heroin market by virtue of several factors: a long common border and religion with Afghanistan, their acceptance of a large number of Afghan refugees, and the emergence of drug processing labs for the conversion of opium to heroin. A political fact of life is that any ruler in Pakistan (they've recently had a series of military coups) must get along with the fundamentalists to survive. |
| Enter Osama Bin Laden; on the record, a brilliant and charismatic leader; he was a rich Saudi activist originally attracted to the cause of the Mujahadeen in the mid Eighties-- a time when they were supported by the CIA. An effective fighter against the Soviets, he has since become an implacable enemy of the U.S. and has demonstrated an impressive ability to rally Arabs of various nationalities to his cause. Whatever his original sources, some of his funding- and much of the economy of both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan- is dependent on heroin. We are not privy to his hold on the governments of either Afghanistan or Pakistan, but clearly, it's powerful. |
| A good analogy can be drawn between Bin Laden and Pablo Escobar, the late architect of the Medellin cartel in Colombia during the late Eighties. |
| While clearly not as political as Bin Laden, Escobar was, nevertheless, a ruthless organizational genius who created a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise. He ruthlessly employed domestic terror to avoid extradition. As a result, he became a focal point of U.S. policy, which eventually succeeded in destroying his organization and killing him. |
| The net result- which should have been anticipated- was that the cocaine trade continued to thrive and was simply taken over by another cartel based in Cali. After we destroyed the Cali cartel, cocaine production became less centralized, but continues to thrive under the protection of the FARC guerrilla movement based in Southern Colombia. |
| We are now engaged in defoliating the Amazon Basin and waging war against Colombian peasants as part of "Plan Colombia," a failing policy which is losing popularity around the world- and at home- even as its original funding has been increased by over one third. |
| In much the same way that we convinced ourselves that success against drugs in Colombia would attend the destruction of the cocaine cartels, we are now convincing ourselves that we can destroy terrorism by waging "war" against specific people and organizations in Southwest Asia and perhaps, the Middle East. Just as we failed to appreciate that our enemy in Colombia was not "drugs,' but human nature itself, we are also failing to understand that what impels Islamic terrorism is not blind hatred of the US, but a long list of grievances, some of which are actually justified. |
| Unless we come to grips with the conceptual defects in both our drug and foreign policies, we risk completely alienating one billion Muslims. The idea that we can eliminate terrorism by killing Bin Laden and his followers is just as ridiculous and ill-conceived as our campaign against the Colombian cartels-- and potentially far more costly in terms blood, treasure, and our ephemeral status as "leader of the free world. |
| by Tom O'Connell |
| October 19, 2001 #222 |
| About the author |