05.02.09
America’s Opium War?
It’s a curious thing; almost as if the editorial board at the NYT doesn’t have time to read the articles its reporters turn in. On page A7 (01May09) there is an article by Benjamin Weiser entitled “Afghan Linked to Taliban Sentenced to Life in Drug Trafficking Case.” At first blush it’s just one more of those “Taliban=Drug Trafficker” stories. Haji Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan, is tried and convicted of moving opiates in large quantities within his native country. And he gets life in prison. Simple enough.
Or is it?
One question the case raises is this: What right does the United States have to try citizens of other nations - who have no official connection with he US - for acts they take in their own nations? In trying and sentencing Noorzai, the US is implicitly asserting a right to try, convict, and sentence people who live in other lands and are subject to other laws, and whosee behavior is not governed by US law.
A noteworthy early and very public example of this behavior was the capture and prosecution of Panama’s President Manuel Noriega by the Bush Administration in 1989. It was a matter of fact that Noriega was entwined with the CIA and that he was also deeply involved in drug trafficking and illegal arms trafficking.
In a syndicated column in 1984 Drugs, Drugs Everywhere and no Solution in Sight William F. Buckley states
Fifty, perhaps sixty percent of all crime is drug related. Ninety percent of illgal drugs reaching the country come in through organized crime. … There are now 4 million frequent cocaine users, 10 million occasional users. The cost of heroin and coke, three years after President Reagan’s big anti-drug campaign was launched are half what they were, which tells us that drugs are more ubiquitous than ever.
Maybe that was the point of the program. And maybe Noriega was making it difficult for the concession to make money. So he was nabbed and thrown in prison on charges that were close enough to the truth that they might stick.
Whatever might have been the motivations to invade, kidnap Noriega, and try him for breaking laws that would not apply to him as a citizen and leader of a sovereign nation, it seems to be a clear violation of the tenet of sovereignty upon which international law is based. It’s hard to understand how one might argue that the US actually has a right to incarcerate citizens of other nations for acts they have committed in their own lands. Other nations, in fact, view the Noriega capture as an act of war, not of law enforcement: and view his incarceration in light of being a prisoner of war, not a common criminal. If one is viewing it in terms of international law, it’s very difficult to believe in national sovereignty and see it any other way.
Between World War II and that day in 1989 when Noriega was captured, it is impossible to find another example of the US removing a citizen of a foreign nation forcefully from his homeland and trying him under US law for acts committed in his own nation. But the treatment of Noriega set the precedent by which Dubya would kidnap and detain purported al Qaeda operatives.
Ironically, as the Bush family was pressing for the right to capture people in other lands and imprison them outside the bounds of any legal doctrine that would allow it, they were simultaneously denying all protections of law under either the US Constitution or the Geneva Convention. The second Bush administration perpetually defended its rights to treat people held at Guantanamo Bay arbirtrarily, beyond the reach of the protections of law. That is not how one treats criminals or war criminals. Not if one cares about learning and making public the nature of their crimes.
The practice of swooping into a country, scooping up people, and throwing them into jail is unprecedented among civilized nations. Civilized nations consider the capture of their citizens by another nation an act of war or of kidnapping. Or both. To behave otherwise is to deny the idea that nations have soveriegn control over their citizens and the resources within their borders. That, in turn invites all sorts of nasty behavior. In fact, it invites chaos.
The practical problem with trying citizens of other nations in US courts for actions they have taken in the sovereign nations of which they are citizens is that it sets up a dangerous precedent. It implicitly invites other nations to do the same to citizens of the US. For example:
Imagine an American, a female divorcee travelling in a nation that follows Sharia law, say the fictitious nation of Irajistan. She refuses advances of a minor government official. By some means not relevant to the story, he finds out she is a divorcee. And that she was not faithful to her previous husband. This means that she has broken Sharia law. The official charges her with infidelity, has her tried; and she is stoned to death. This is precisely the kind of world we are creating if we kidnap people from other nations, try them (or not) in US courts for breaking US law in other sovereign lands, and incarcerate them.
Noorzai travelled to the US of his own accord to “meet with government officials, lured.. by two goverment contractors who said the Americans wanted to talk with him about terrorism financing and promised him safe passage home. Instead, after 11 days of talks with federal agents, he was arrested.” One can make the argument that luring a person into the US is different from kidnapping them. But the issue of reciprocity is the same; the woman in the fiction above was in Irajistan of her own accord. It is impossible to argue that (from a western point of view) she deserved to be stoned to death.
The second question raised by the Noorzai story concerns certain relationships in commerce and political power. The headline and a sentence in the second paragraph hint at Noorzai’s connection with Muhammed Omar. It’s as if the editorial board want us to see the story as one more link between the Taliban and drug smuggling.
The tribal leader Haji Bashir Noorzai, whose case drew wide attention because of his prominent role in the drug trade and his ties to Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive leader of the Taliban, was found guilty last fall of taking part in a conspiracy that sent tens of millions of dollars worth of heroin around the world, including to the United States.
At first glance, the casual juxtaposition of Mullah Mohammed Omar and language about drug trafficking causes us to link the two facts mentally. But in actual fact, the sentence barely asserts any link, and the article never shows any sort of relationship between Noorzai and Mullah Omar. After parsing the quoted sentence carefully one realizes that one might just as well say “Noorzai, a petty drug smuggler and tribal leader lived in Afghanistan when it was ruled by Mullah Omar.”
The fact is, the Taliban, when they had complete control of Afghanistan eliminated opiate production altogether. If Noorzai held with the Taliban and enforced their position on opium production and distribution, he would be innocent of the drug charges. Alternatively, if Noorzai had been a major drug trafficker, he would have been part of a coalition to oppose Omar in order to restore the trade.
Noorzai claimed he did help the US invasion, so maybe he hoped to be a drug smuggler. But the charges against him suggest he was, at best, a bit player in the drug supply chain. Recall that Afghanistan, since the US invasion, has seen opiate production climb from nil to about $50 billion per year in street value. Even if Noorzai managed to distribute one hundred million of dollars’ worth of opiates in the course of the eight years, this amounts to about 0.25% of the Afghan production. Noorzai was not a big fish. He was neither a major Taliban operative nor a major drug smuggler. Perhaps he deserves to be in jail, but the case has no material effect on the business of the cartel.
How does one account for the turn of events? Perhaps he was prosecuted for working outside an officially sanctioned cartel. Or perhaps he was prosecuted just so that there would be another story equating Taliban with drugs. In neither case is the truth about Afghanistan being accurately reflected in the press - at least not in the headlines and ledes.
Interestingly, the story reminds us of the recurring nexus of arms and drugs and CIA operatives. Noorzai “once led a force of mujahedeen fighters in the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union” and “had helped the US recover stinger missiles that the CIA had provided to Afghan rebels.” During the invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai’s tribe “collected and gave the American authorities thousands of Taliban weapons” - a service for which he was not directly paid. So why did he render it? Noorzai has close and trusting ties with CIA contractors. The article suggests as much, else whe would not have come to the US. What was he hoping to gain? A concession, perhaps.
It’s another of many stories suggesting the possibility that contractors working for the CIA and/or for certain arms of the military were involved in drug smuggling enterprises in Afghanistan. With $50 billion/year at stake, it is inevitable that some sort of de facto trade of arms for drugs would occur.
It is helpful to start the story with the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan starting in 1979. Mujahedeen resisted, using arms surreptitiously supplied by the US. That required CIA “contractors” who would deal with the likes of Osama bin Laden. Sometimes they provided arms. Sometimes training or logistical support. But in any case they cultivated a close working relationship. From the Afghan/Mujahedeen point of view, the arms were the most valuable thing they could get from the relationship. But it is impossible to view all Mujahedeen as being interchangeable. And CIA contractors had to choose which groups would get what and how much. How were they to choose? Part of that choice must have been a quid pro quo. The Mujahedeen had something to trade that was extremely easy to transport, and extremely valuable.
That was opium. So the mujahedeen traded opium for arms. CIA contractors might have gotten some or all of the weapons gratis from the DOD. But they certainly would not distribute them for free if they stood to make tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for the same effort, trading in opiates.
Assuming this happened on any scale - and it is naive to imagine that it did not - the second worst thing that could happen to the business was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980’s; for it made US arms less valuable, opening up the possibility of alternative distribution networks.
Who was poised to capitalize on this? Al Qaeda. They had connections with the producers. All they would have had to do to reap much greater profits was to establish direct contacts with foreign distributors and cut out the US middlemen. Suggestive of the fact that they were in the process of doing this is the fact that al Qaeda was deep into the blood diamond business in the mid 1990’s. Especially when peace has broken out, that’s the currency the drugs/arms business.
Curiously, this line of reasoning might give al Qaeda a motive for wanting the Taliban removed. Assuming the eradication of opium was not their own idea to weaken the existing distribution system so as to allow them to rebuild it from scratch, eliminating the Taliban would be the only way they might continue building their drug-smuggling empire. But it seems unlikely that they would have hoped for a US invasion which would risk setting the very operatives who sold them arms in direct contact with the Afghan suppliers.
There is no question that al Qaeda was a criminal operation, that it did smuggle arms, that it did trade opiates for arms, and that it did attempt to grab tens of millions of diamond to use as currency in its smuggling operations. It is more of a leap of logic to assert that al Qaeda somehow threatened the cartel.
If, however, we suspend disbelief and assume that al Qaeda operatives were jailed in Guantanamo for approximately the same reason Noriega was jailed in Miami - threatening the family business - then all the language about “national security” and all the efforts to detain without public oversight begin to make sense.
It’s the timing that tells the story, though. The worst thing that could happen to the business was the Taliban’s complete eradication of opiate production; for Afghanistan supplies roughly 90% of the world’s heroin. It threatened the collapse of the whole distribution network which had to operate on stored inventory while the Taliban was being overthrown. Furthermore, the Taliban had created stability in the region for the first time in decades, obviating the need for arms. It was a terrible blow to many interests.
Cast in this light, one might reasonably wonder to what extent the US recent actions against al Qaeda and the Taliban echo those against Manuel Noriega long ago. Do both represent defenses of commercial turf?