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[Reproduced from _The Village Voice_, 4/15/93]
THE CIA AND HEROIN FINANCED THE MUJAHEDEEN
By Robert I. Friedman
The World Trade Center bombing is the legacy of the CIA's disastrous policy of arming the mujahedeen in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not only have Afghan war veterans been implicated in the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history, but mujahedeen warlords also have become the world's biggest heroin producers, according to experts in the international drug trade.
The CIA's arms shipments and training program for the mujahedeen became one of its most massive covert operations, costing at least $2 billion, far surpassing U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras. If anything, the battle for Afghanistan motivated the CIA more than the war against the Sandinistas. In Nicaragua, the CIA fought Soviet proxies. In Afghanistan, the enemy was the Soviet army, which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
Support for Nicaraguan and Afghani "freedom fighters" became the cornerstone of the so-called Reagan Doctrine - an attempt not just to contain Communism but to roll it back. While the contras were mostly a collection of former dictator Anastasio Somoza's street thugs, in Afghanistan the rebels were Islamic extremists and narco-terrorists who hated America as much as they despised the Godless Russians.
Billions of dollars of CIA money, matched by billions from Saudi Arabia (a quid pro quo for receiving AWAC surveillance planes over the adamant protests of the pro-Israel lobby), were passed through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to the Afghan rebels. The bank was also used to channel funds to the contras. But no matter how much money the Afghan rebels received it never seemed to be enough. In order to augment their funds, rebel chieftains began to grow poppies, refine opium into heroin, and sell the drug in the U.S. and Europe. In 1979, Pakistan and Afghanistan exported virtually no heroin to the West. By 1981, the drug lords, many high-ranking members of Pakistan's political and military establishment, controlled 60 per cent of America's heroin market. "Trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin-protected by ISI [Pakistan's internal security service] papers from police search," wrote Alfred McCoy in The Politics of Heroin (Lawrence Hill, 1991).
Of the seven rebel mujahedeen leaders who operated from base-camps in Peshawar, by far the most dominant is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received more than $1 billion in covert U.S. aid. Hekmatyar was an obscure Islamic fanatic before he was tapped by the CIA. Today, his forces are nine miles from Kabul, where until recently he was engaged in bloody battles against the Afghan army - indiscriminately raining tens of thousands of rockets and artillery shells on the nation's capital. A March 7 Pakistani-brokered peace accord named Hekmatyar Afghan's prime minister-designate.
All through the 1980s, Hekmatyar received accolades from the U.S. press, even though Asia Watch, among others, published gory reports about his human rights abuses. Hekmatyar brutally murdered rivals, then had their corpses ritually mutilated. "He really did dominate the Afghan refugee camps and was known among the refugees as being willing to retaliate against anyone who challenged his political authority," McCoy, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin, told the Voice. Only after the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989 did The New York Times criticize Hekmatyar's "sinister nature." The Times, however, never bothered to tell its readers that Hekmatyar is also among the world's biggest heroin dealers, a distinction he has enjoyed for nearly a decade. A May 1990 front-page article in The Washington Post charged that U.S. officials had ignored Afghani complaints of heroin trafficking by Hekmatyar and Pakistani intelligence. Some experts now believe that Hekmatyar will vastly increase Afghanistan's opium harvest when he becomes prime minister. "There were preliminary reports about six months ago based on interviews with UN personnel in the region that Afghanistan by itself could produce 3000 tons of opium," says McCoy. "Now that's nearly equivalent to the world's supply no matter how you calculate it. It's one little country and it's going to double the world's supply all by itself."
It's easier - and far more profitable - for the 4 to 5 million Afghans returning home from the refugee camps in Pakistan to plant poppies than rebuild their war-shattered economy, says McCoy. Afghanistan's agriculture was destroyed by the war and it will take a lot of nurturing to revive the groves of oranges, its principal cash crop before the war. Poppies need little tending and they will guarantee peasants an almost immediate income. "Opium is the ideal solution," says McCoy. "They can put it in and in six months they've got a harvest." But while Hekmatyar has inundated the U.S. and Europe with the potent powder, U.S. officials have remained silent.
Ruined citrus crops, a plague of heroin, and hundreds of thousands of casualties didn't deter the CIA from its holy war against communism in Afghanistan. "On the afternoon of February 15, 1989, the champagne began flowing at CIA headquarters," wrote Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner in Blank Check, a book about covert operations. "A rare exultation filled the air. After fifteen years of failure and humiliation, the Agency had won a famous victory. The last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan. The Agency's biggest covert action since the height of the Vietnam war had achieved its goal. The CIA had won its jihad."
The real winners, of course, are Hekmatyar and the tens of thousands of Islamic holy warriors -- trained and financed by the CIA -- who are today locked in a life and death struggle with America. According to this week's New Yorker, it was Hekmatyar who "most likely" introduced Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to the American and Pakistani intelligence officials who were orchestrating the Afghan war when the sheikh visited Pakistan just prior to moving to Brooklyn in May 1990. As the Voice previously reported, the CIA almost certainly facilitated the sheikh's entry into the United States as a reward for helping the mujahedeen - despite his presence on a State Department terrorism watch list. Mahmud Abouhalima, an Afghan war vet and the sheikh's driver, has been indicted for his alleged involvement in the World Trade Center bombing. The wreckage and death caused by the blast is a depressing coda to the end of the Cold War. And thanks to the CIA's favorite freedom fighters, heroin addiction is again on the rise in America. *
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