-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.hightimes.com/News/9809/afghan.tpl Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.hightimes.com/News/9809/afghan.tpl">HIGH TIMES - UN Drug $ For Terror?</A> ----- UN Drug $ For Terror? HOW AFGHAN ANTIDRUG SCHEME WENT SOUR FILED 9/1/98 The United Nations International Narcotics Control Board has continuously called for a global crackdown on publications and political activity that it deems "anti-prohibitionist," impeding its War on Drugs. (Read an excellent ove rview of the UN's justification for universal censorship and political suppression.) Censorship certainly couldn't happen quick enough for Pino Arlacchi, chief of the UN Drug Control Program. When the US last week blasted the Afghanistan training camps of Osama bin Laden, the Daddy Warbucks of international terrorism, Arlacchi had to know that within hours someone would be Internetting the whole story of how bin Laden and his collAboutrators in the Taliban theocracy last spring euchered millions of dollars out of Arlacchi's UNDCP. And then they went on to make enough from this year's Afghan opium harvest to carry their Holy War up into Central Asia, not to mention the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Co- conspirators? Drug Czars Pino Arlacchi of the UN and (standing) Barry McCaffrey of the USA, at last June's global dope klatch. When the Drug Czar of the United Nations, Pino Arlacchi, sat down with the leaders of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan last November, he says, "I told them bluntly, you have two problems: drugs and women." The Taliban's harboring of Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi terrorism financier, was not a problem at the time for the United Nations Drug Control Program chief, a former Mafia prosecutor gearing up for a grand worldwide War on Drugs. Undeniably, bin Laden in the past had supported the heroin-moving mu jahadeen freedom-fighters while they overthrew the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But then the mujahadeen (who had also been supported by the American CIA) were themselves overthrown by the Quran-thumping Taliban, whose fervent authoritarianism looked promising to Arlacchi. "Because we are Muslims," the Taliban governor of Kandahar province piously promised Pino Arlacchi, "we are against any kind of business with drugs." The new ultra-fundamentalist lords of Jalalabad--the new holy city of the Taliban, where Osama bin Laden at the time was being very comfortably entertained as an "honored guest," along with his numerous wives--initially promised the UNDCP chief they'd simply execute anyone caught growing poppy in their territory. Then they handsomely allowed themselves to be negotiated into a more humanitarian stance; in exchange for a ten-year UN-funded counterdrug program, they swore to destroy any new poppy plantings they found henceforth, and any morphine-processing labs they might come across. As for their problem with women, Arlacchi also gained the Taliban's solemn promise to use some of that counterdrug money to reopen a carpet factory in Jalalabad and hire 200 women to work in it. And so the first $25 million installment from the UNDCP went forward with great fanfare and publicity, enlisting the Taliban as frontline wnaviors in Arlacchi's final solution to the global dope trade. Everyone loved this wholesome Afghanistan project, especially the New York Times, which presented Arlacchi's flirtation with the Taliban as a capital bit of realpolitik for the drug-free new millennium. "Authoritarian enforcement may be distasteful to the West," reasoned an April Op-Ed piece on the Taliban's narcotics jihad, but then "so were many of the dictators Washington dealt with during the Cold War." Unfortunately, these particular authoritarians had a tendency to spit the bit, right from the first, and spectacularly. This overture from the UN Drug Control Program was the first substantial gesture of international approval the Taliban ever received, and they used it as moral capital for an orgy of fundamentalist brutality unseen in modern times. Far from ever hiring any women carpet-weavers, the Taliban's Committee for the Suppression of Vice and Promotion of Virtue closed down every weaving school in their territories which taught girl pupils over the age of eight. Food vendors were jailed if they sold groceries to unaccompanied women--widows, for example--and every hospital in Kabul was closed to women patients, even in emergencies, except for one which had no running water. But none of this affected their UN dope grant, because the Taliban were also ferociously conducting a rather wonderful hashish crackdown. Anyone caught with hash was immediately bastinadoed on the spot until they turned over their suppliers, and then subjected to "addiction treatment" consisting of a three-hour-long icewater bath every day until their captors decided they'd sufficiently repented, and released them with a salutory public flogging. Far from endangering the Taliban's UN subsidy, this zealous antidrug activity virtually soldered it in place permanently, despite all the Taliban's misogynistic excesses. In fact, Arlacchi's UN drug-control clique was still boasting about the Taliban's antidope drive even after April, when adventuresome reporters visiting the hinterlands around Kandahar discovered enough poppy coming up there to put Afghanistan on a par with Burma for the 1988 opium season. Osama bin Laden, in Kandahar in poppy time. Coincidentally or not, just in time for poppy season Osama bin Laden moved to Kandahar, where the Taliban's political and military strategists have headquarters. "Kandahar is the decision-making center of the Taliban movement," explained their information minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, "and if bin Laden wants to discuss anything he can go and see the leader personally." When reporters asked about all that new poppy coming up in the Arghandab Valley just down the road--even though the Taliban had vowed to Arlacchi that they'd eradicate any new plantings--the Amir opaquely responded that the poor wretched farmers would starve without it. And that was just the new poppy. Further south in Helmand province, where poppy has been grown ever since the CIA first taught the mujahadeen how to do it properly in the late '70s, a huger crop than ever was coming up last spring. While the Taliban's mullahs were torturing hash-smokers in public to keep the UNDCP entertained, they were also exacting the official ten-percent z akat tax, imposed on all agricultural produce, from the poppy-growers, who were doing better than ever before. All those fervent pledges by the Taliban to eradicate this year's crop for the benefit of the UNDCP had driven up prices 400 percent, to over $200 per kilo of opium, paid to the farmers in the field by the collectors in solid Pakistani currency. And so the Taliban's mullahs wound up with at least $50 million in opium-tax revenues, by conservative estimate, to top off the UNDCP's $25 million. As late as June, Pino Arlacchi's narco inspectors were being treated to grand public displays of fundamentalist "addiction treatment" in the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad, and once they were even conducted to witness a bonfire of two tons of opium. Meanwhile, heroin-finishing labs on the Pakistan border were working overtime, and to the north, Afghan opium and morphine base was being lugged across Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Turkey in unprecedented volume. Arlacchi's UNDCP press releases, believe it or not, were still raving about that two-ton opium conflagration when the Security Council in New York City opened its gala three-day Special Session on Drug Abuse, which made so much empty press last June. This was the session at which, originally, the UN Narcotics Control Board had been geared up to cite the Single Convention Treaty on Drugs as overriding international legislation obliging member nations to censor their media and internal political discourse of all dissent against Arlacchi's Global War on Drugs. In the event, nothing of substance happened at that "drug summit" at all, thanks largely to this Taliban disaster. The Taliban did have a representative at Arlacchi's dope klatch last July, one Noorullah Zadan. When reporters asked what happened to all that UNDCP money which had been designated for them, he complained that nearly all of it had been spent, well before it got to them, by the UNDCP administrators. "God knows we tried," he snivelled. "There is a difference in cultures. There is a difference in perception." Dean Latimer - Special to HT News NEWSFLASH RECENT ARCHIVE CLICK HERE FOR PROVEN DRUG TESTING SOLUTIONS This material is copyrighted and may not be republished without permission of HIGH TIMES magazine. © 2000 Trans-High Corporation. The information and images you receive online from the HIGH TIMES web site are protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The copyright laws prohibit any copying, redistributing, retransmitting, or repurposing of any copyright-protected material. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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