Cheers, Ken Hanly
The Village Voice June 20 - 26, 2001
Taliban Twists Shrub With Poppy Politics
Bush's Opium Bender
by James Ridgeway
In its dealings with Afghanistan, the Bush administration has inherited a real catch-22. On the one hand, the White House needs to get rid of the terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is sheltered by the ruling Taliban. On the other, it wants to continue the global war on drugs - a campaign in which the internationally shunned Islamic extremists have become an unexpected ally, slapping a ban on growing the poppies that provided 75 percent of the world's opium supply.
Now Bush is in the ungainly position of favoring the Northern Alliance, a Russian-backed resistance group that funds its efforts in part by trafficking in narcotics. "The basic problem is that the U.S. so far has failed disastrously in Afghanistan, and for a decade has had no policy toward Afghanistan other than bin Laden," says S. Frederick Starr, chair of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It is legal under U.S.-led UN sanctions to send arms to the Northern Alliance, which is actively exporting drugs, but illegal to send arms to the Taliban, which has stopped drug production."
In eradicating poppies, Afghanistan shut down a market with a total production value of $100 billion. The Taliban received relatively little of that money, with annual revenues during the 1990s of $10 million to $75 million, but farmers could still bank on a crop worth five times as much as conventional rice or wheat.
Starr argues that if the UN fails to loosen the strictures against Afghanistan, the Taliban may let farmers plant poppies again rather than allow other countries like Pakistan and Myanmar to jump in. The Taliban has no standing with the UN, which has given Afghanistan's seat to the Northern Alliance. So far, the Taliban leaders' biggest role in the world economy has been supplying the raw material for drugs. "And without Western, U.S., and UN leadership," Starr says, "it will not change."
Afghanistan's poppy growers are having an especially rough time of it because a drought is compounding the difficulty of switching to other crops. This year, the U.S. allocated $120 million in aid to Afghanistan, including $43 million in food aid during the month of May. Assisting the Afghan people, says Charles Fairbanks, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under Bush and Reagan who now teaches at Johns Hopkins, is the only moral choice. The U.S. helped create the mess there when it sided against Russian invaders in the 1980s, giving the impression we'd be around to help with the consequences, too. Aid now "is a matter of honor," Fairbanks says. "They fought on the American side and the side of the administration in the last battle of the Cold War, and we just abandoned them. There is something not right about that."