-Caveat Lector-
Taliban Twists Shrub With Poppy Politics
Bush's Opium Bender
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0125/ridgeway.shtml
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.''
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