Drugs, Law and Conflict

Photo courtesy of Boston.com Bringas

It seems that the 2009 UN World Drug Report, available here, has inspired The Boston Globe to come up with a compelling photo essay chronicling the War on Drugs and its effects throughout the world – definitely worth a look.

**Opium sap drying during processing in Afghanistan.

TIME has a great photoessay on heroin, drug trafficking, and drug use available on its website.

Blackwater planes dropping supplies to US troops in Afghanistan.

In the the Yucatan Peninsula in July, I had the fortune to run into two friendly engineers from Ciudad Juárez. Over a round of drinks, we shared thoughts on US-Mexico relations and the escalating drug war.

When the subject of US private security contractors came up, though, our lively conversation suddenly turned into a kind of interrogation. There are private citizens serving alongside the US military in Iraq? they asked me in disbelief. They assist with coca fumigation in Colombia, and then hire Colombians to go to the Middle East to share their experience with “urban terrorism”? And these contractors are largely unaccountable under the law?

Unfortunately, I responded.

Moreover, as Reuters reported recently and I scoped here last October, these companies are set to receive a huge amount of funds within the Merida Initiative. That is, most of the $1.4 billion promised to Mexico and Central America will never cross the border.

My new friends shook their heads. Pinches gringos.

And the story of private security firms in US anti-drug efforts just gets more and more interesting. Border Lines noted that last week’s Border Security Conference, attended by Janet Napolitano, was sponsored by big firms Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and SAIC, among others.

Then, yesterday, a truly interesting article from the New York Times on the role of Blackwater contractors in a CIA scheme to kill top al Qaeda leaders. According to the Times,

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program [from 2002-2009], which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects… Officials said that the C.I.A. program was devised partly as an alternative to missile strikes using drone aircraft, which have accidentally killed civilians and cannot be used in urban areas where some terrorists hide.

(We can see that Blackwater, now Xe Services, really covers its bases via today’s Times article, which reveals they also have contracts to assemble the drones.)

Let’s look briefly at how the CIA program developed:

- Although the CIA is banned from carrying out assassinations thanks to a 1976 presidential order, targeted killing of al Qaeda members was considered exempt, since it’s considered to be parallel to attacking enemy soldiers in battle.

- Since the CIA had legal authority to kill al Qaeda leaders, Cheney told the agency there was no need to inform congress that they’d actually contracted out the work.

- The contracting was never “formal,” but through “individual agreements with top company officials.”

That Cheney. Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile… Seriously, though, these revelations have ramifications for US counterdrug activities in Afghanistan, especially considering the Senate just indicated a desire to include certain traffickers on the military’s joint integrated prioritized target list. There is certainly an argument to be made in favor of targeted killings of terrorists, as well as to the benefits associated with classifying insurgency-supporting drug lords as military targets. Yet it’s starting to seem feasible that if we continue in this direction, we could have a “war” between two groups formerly known as noncombatants: (private citizen) contractors, planning the killings of (private citizen) drug traffickers. Or do we already, Mr. Cheney?

US Marines in Helmand Province. Photo courtesy of Eros Hoagland via The New York Times.

On Monday, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations released a report entitled “Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents,” which includes several revealing pieces of information.

First, as the LA Times reports,

The two spy agencies [the CIA and DIA] believe that Taliban leaders receive about $70 million a year from Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop — far lower than the $400-million estimate released last year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Now there’s a discrepancy for you. Apparently, the UNODC “is expected to revise its estimate of the drug money flowing to the Taliban, reducing the figure to about $125 million this year. U.N. analysts told Senate aides they had miscalculated the scope of the problem beyond Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban is particularly strong.”

That, plus another “oops,” this time from the US side:

In one of its most disconcerting conclusions, the Senate report says the United States inadvertently contributed to the resurgent drug trade after the Sept. 11 attacks by backing warlords who derived income from the flow of illegal drugs. The CIA and U.S. Special Forces put such warlords on their payroll during the drive to overthrow the Taliban regime in late 2001.

“These warlords later traded on their stature as U.S. allies to take senior positions in the new Afghan government, laying the groundwork for the corrupt nexus between drugs and authority that pervades the power structure today,” the report says.

This reminds me of Peter Andreas’ fascinating research on Bosnia, where he found the postwar political and economic elite included smugglers who had proved essential to the war effort — an unintended result of the UN arms embargo.

Okay, so we supported drug-trafficking Afghan warlords. What do we do now? Along with the removal of aerial fumigation from the policy set, the Senate report lays out plans to include major drug traffickers in the military’s “joint integrated prioritized target list.” The New York Times clarifies, “That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.” Designation for this list requires “two credible sources and substantial additional evidence” that the individual is a major trafficker, and is providing support to the insurgency.

Now, about those credible sources…

**Photo courtesy of the AP.

Harsh words from Richard Holbrooke, US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, on Saturday in announcing the end of US eradication policy. Calling eradication “a waste of money” and “a failure,” Holbrooke added that the US would use funds formerly dedicated to destroying poppy fields for “interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops.”

Wow. A big change indeed. But what’s next?

First, it’s important to recognize that the US is just one international actor participating in counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. In fact, the Telegraph reports that Britain “leads international reconstruction efforts in Helmand province, where 60 per cent of the Afghan opium crop is produced. The British government is spending more than £290 million on a three-year-programme of eradication, support for farmers and pursuit of drug barons and traffickers.” And they have no plan to stop.

On the interdiction front, the foreign ministers Holbrooke addressed at Saturday’s G-8 meeting have called for a “regional intelligence network” to slow cross-border flows of precursor chemicals and processed opium. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of the UNODC, Pakistan and Iran will be key players. Highlighting the challenges ahead, though, Iran was uninvited from Saturday’s G-8 meeting following the government’s violent response to the post-election protest movement.

Regarding rule of law initiatives and alternative crop development, the question is not just one of money but also of will. Holbrooke told reporters Saturday that the US would increase its funds for agricultural assistance up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet Jessica Thompson, writing for Sterling on Justice and Drugs, stresses the central challenge that remains unresolved: how to keep illegal funds not only out of the hands of al Qaeda terrorists, but also away from the corrupt Afghan government.

Finally, Alex Coolman of Drug Law Blog reminds us that the US continues a failed domestic eradication policy:

[California's CAMP campaign against marijuana] enriches the very people we’re ostensibly trying to combat — drug dealers — just like the Afghan eradication campaign “helped the Taliban” under a misguided attempt to combat the Taliban.This happens because — shock! — reducing the supply of something simply causes a corresponding increase in its price, and the drug producers therefore get to pocket more money than they would in the absence of such intervention…

Eradication didn’t work in Afghanistan. Maybe it’s time to realize that it’s a bad policy for California, too.

part 4 of a 4-part weeklong series

• The AFP offers a bleak but must-read portrait of the problems associated with increasing quantities of Afghan heroin passing through Pakistan, as the drug trade shifts:

Pakistan shares a 2,500-kilometre (1,560-mile) porous border with Afghanistan, which supplies 90 percent of the opium used to make heroin worldwide. As such, the largely lawless region is the key transit point for heroin, morphine and hashish heading west to Iran, Turkey, the Balkans and Europe, and east to China.

As it passes through what has become the central theatre of the “war on terror,” cheap supplies are left behind for the locals, with one gram costing as little as 80 rupees (one dollar) in Karachi, the southern port on the Arabian Sea and Pakistan’s commercial hub.

The result? Overwhelmed security forces and 4 million drug addicts facing a “chronically underfunded and crumbling health system.” Note that the number of addicts is reported by the Pakistani Anti-Narcotics Force, “which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting drug offences”–ie, not a public health organism. This force, nevertheless, works in conjunction with paramilitary units to patrol the contested border. The article states that the most commonly abused drug in Pakistan is actually hashish, whose production is on the rise in Afghanistan as well. Unfortunately, authorities there are busy combating the opium trade. (Sorry, Pakistan.)

• Haji Juma Khan, one of Afghanistan’s leading opium traffickers, faces new charges in US court. Reuters reports that the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office revealed a superceding indictment including charges of narco-terrorism, conspiracy to fund and financing terrorism. The narco-terrorism charges are some of the first employed under the federal statute passed in 2006. The Guardian last year featured a long profile on the interesting character that is Khan: “an elderly, pious-looking Baluch tribesman” and yet “one of about 20 men who run Afghanistan’s £2bn heroin trade.”

• Success in Helmand? The Washington Times reports on recent successes in Helmand, including the capture of seven major players in the Afghan heroin trade:

While Afghanistan remains the world’s largest source of opium and heroin, the arrests have provided crucial information about the operations of complex South Asian drug syndicates and the links they have with extremists…

“In Afghanistan, you can’t separate drugs from terrorism,” [ex-DEA operations chief Michael] Braun said. “The drug traffickers are trying to destabilize the government, and it’s the same for the terrorists. They all thrive in the same ungoverned space.”

• Speaking of governance… Ashraf Ghani, a candidate in Afghanistan’s August presidential elections, has released a report with the Atlantic Council laying out recommendations for a ten-year plan. According to the Washington Post, the plan has four central components:

“The game changer is to produce a legitimate election that the next government of Afghanistan can have a mandate,” said Ghani, who is seen as an outside contender in the August 20 presidential vote.

Second, the international community needs to develop a coherent strategy to reverse a situation in which development aid efforts are often wasteful, unaccountable and prone to funneling most of the donors’ money to foreign experts and contractors, he said.

Ghani said the third element was new national programs modeled on relatively unheralded successes in Afghanistan such as the National Solidarity Program for rural development and the national telecommunications network.

Finally, eight of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces should be set up as model provinces — laboratories for reforms.

• An editorial in the Toronto Star suggests legalizing opium for medical purposes as part of a holistic counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan. The authors write,

No, we’re not advocating the legalization of opium or heroin, but legalizing the poppy agriculture in Afghanistan with contracts to use the opiates to create medicine, like morphine and codeine…

Opiate-based painkillers are already available and cheap, but many under-privileged countries import little or none, largely because they fear the drug will lead to addiction and abuse. Meanwhile, their sick suffer needlessly. While these drugs can be highly addictive when used illegally, doctors in the western world have had great success in treating patients with opiates, and report low levels of addiction. With an aggressive education campaign on the benefits and realities of opiate-based painkillers, developing nations could cause an enormous swell to the world’s demand for poppies.

• Hezbollah relies on Mexican organized crime for smuggling drugs and humans into the US. According to authorities cited by the Washington Times, “The Iran-backed Lebanese group has long been involved in narcotics and human trafficking in South America’s tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Increasingly, however, it is relying on Mexican narcotics syndicates that control access to transit routes into the U.S.”

• …while local Lebanese traffickers target the military in a revenge attack. Last week, gunmen supposedly associated with the hashish and heroin-trafficking Jaafar clan attacked an army truck using small arms and a rocket-propelled grenade, killing five. According to the LA Times, the incident came as a response to the killing of a Jaafar clan patriarch of at an army checkpoint in late March.

• New resources: The Afghan Conflict Monitor has a wonderful Facts and Figures section regarding the drug trade which features a ton of information on three central issues: drugs production, opium trafficking routes and counternarcotics strategy.

A number of important reports on international drug control have been released recently.

• Today, the UN released the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) Annual Report. The report highlights new supply routes through the Balkans and West Africa into Europe, and the falling price of cocaine. Check out related articles here and here.

• The South East Asia Opium Survey, issued by the UNODC, “shows that the region, once notorious as heroin’s Golden Triangle, has a limited opium problem that is concentrated in just one region of Myanmar.” According to UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa, “This is a drug control success story.”

• The UNODC’s Opium Winter Assessment finds “a likely reduction in the amount of opium grown in Afghanistan in 2009.”

• The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, headed by the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, released its main findings in a much talked-about statement entitled, “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift.” The report is worth a read in its entirety, but essentially calls for an end to the “failed war” against drugs and a re-framing of international efforts–toward consumption reduction, alternative development, decriminalization of marijuana, and public health, plus a redirection of repressive strategies toward high-level traffickers.

• Just in time for the Israeli elections: the Holocaust Survivors & Grown-Up Green Leaf Party. (via Chris Blattman)

• The American National Security Council (NSC) will be reorganized and expanded, perhaps to include the DEA, under Obama. As Eric Sterling argues on his blog, Sterling on Justice and Drugs, “Elevating the issue can help clarify that the intrinsic ineffectuality of drug prohibition is a serious aggravation of our national security.”

• Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country’s future, a BBC/ABC News poll finds. Drug traffickers are perceived as a declining threat, as the Taliban establish greater territorial dominance, and security concerns are greatest in the south and east of the country.

• Guatemala and the US have signed a letter of agreement releasing $3.65 million of Mérida Initiative aid. According to the State Department press release, “the Guatemalan Ministry of Government will participate in the following five projects fully funded by the U.S. Government: Central American Fingerprint Exchange, $400,000; Central American Vetted and Sensitive Investigative Units (SIU), $500,000; Transnational Anti-Gang Initiative (TAG), $1,225,000; Improved policing and police equipment, $975,500; and improved prison management, $550,000.” $550,000 will also go to the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.

• More on Mexican Brigadier General Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones, tortured and killed last week in Cancún, from the Washington Post. Tello was one of the highest-ranking military officers in Mexico and recently tapped to create and head an elite special forces unit to combat drug traffickers in the city. According to the article,

The Cancun mayor said he believes that “the strongest theory” points to the Zetas because of the brutality of the crime and its sophistication. Also, during his long military career, Tello served as the commander of army forces in the state of Michoacan, a drug production and trafficking hot spot. “The general worked very hard and did a lot of work in Michoacan, where the Zetas have a very strong presence, a very active cell,” Mayor Sánchez said.

There are other possible motives. A decade ago, Tello served as a leader of Mexico City’s public security agency, where he was accused of torturing and killing six detained youths. He was cleared of the charges.

According to reports in the local media, there are a number of clues, including footprints and fingerprints on the pickup truck in which the three bodies were found in the jungle, and video camera images from the streets around downtown Cancun where the men were abducted.

• An LA Times photo essay on the fall-out of the capture of “El Pozolero,” who allegedly disappeared hundreds of corpses of rival drug traffickers in Tijuana. Full story here.

• A new take on the Michael Phelps marijuana revelation, from a Boston Globe op-ed: “The legalization of pot would also afford Phelps the chance to become a pioneer in the field of celebrity-endorsed paraphernalia. After all, who wouldn’t want to buy a water pipe officially endorsed by Aquaman?”

**Poppies and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Asfouri/Agence France-Presse.

• “Drug money: the other, other liquid investment capital”: Reuters reports on a newspaper interview with UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa. According to Costa,

In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital… In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.

He added that the UNODC has evidence that “interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” but declined to give further details.

• Reform of Afghani government necessary to US success there, not just troop surge, according to a NYTimes opinion piece.

• The chief of Colombia’s National Police tells a Colombian daily that the global drug trade’s “center of gravity” is Mexico, as a result of his country’s anti-drug efforts.

• US opinion on the claim that Mexico could become a failed state, from the Wall Street Journal: “[I]f Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state, look no further than the large price premium the cartels get for peddling prohibited substances to Americans.”

• Mexico’s ambassador to the United States responds:

The violence unleashed by trafficking organizations in response to President Calderon’s effort to shut them down cannot be denied. If one considers the criteria that could lead to a “sudden collapse” — loss of territorial control; inability to provide public services; refugees and internally displaced people; criminalization of the state; sharp economic decline; and incapacity to interact as a full number of the international community — it is obvious that Mexico simply doesn’t fit the pattern.

• The BBC reports on the recent capture of Santiago Meza, “El Pozolero” or the “stew maker,” who supposedly earned $600 a week from Tijuana-based trafficker Teodoro Garcia Simental (see LATimes profile here) to dissolve the corpses of his rivals in acid. Meza was presented before the media by the Mexican army, and admitted to dissolving nearly 300 bodies.

• Cannabis officially upgraded to Class B drug in the UK, after being downgraded just four years ago. According to the BBC, the reclassificiation will include a “three strikes” approach to possession (an £80 fine for the first and second offense, then arrest on the third offense) as well as an increase in the maximum prison term for possession (from two years to five). But not everyone’s happy, as the decision goes against the advice of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The BBC reports,

The advisory council’s report, Cannabis: Classification and Public Health, described the drug as a “significant public health issue”. But it said it should still remain a Class C drug, saying the risks were not as serious as those of Class B substances such as amphetamines and barbiturates.

• More on Mexican vigilantes.

• The Transnational Institute has released a new report on the drug trade in Southeast Asia, “Withdrawal Symptoms in the Golden Triangle: A Drugs Market in Disarray,” in an effort to better understand how the market is responding to law enforcement interventions in the region.

• The Afghani government doesn’t like Hillary Clinton’s “narcostate” label, but admits they have little control over poppy-rich Helmand Province, in an AP article.

• Denise Dresser argues in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that Obama and Calderón have a long way to go to deal with drug violence and corruption in Mexico. She writes,

The current strategy — based largely on the increased militarization of Mexico — isn’t doing enough to end government corruption. Drug traffickers finance politicians, and politicians protect drug traffickers. Judges take bribes. Unregulated financial institutions make it easy to launder money. A weak, ill-trained, underpaid police force is easily infiltrated. And most important, Mexico’s economic structure thwarts growth and social mobility, forcing Mexicans to either cross the border for a better life or to join the narco-culture.

Obama, for his part, needs to acknowledge the negative role the U.S. has played by largely ignoring Mexico’s — and his own country’s — failures in fighting the drug trade.

• Vigilantes in Ciudad Juárez? Reuters reports–although without too much to report, considering the dearth of evidence for the group’s existence. (Hence such frequent use of words like “shadow.”) This would be a disturbing phenomenon, though, and the article does cite a case early this year of potential, although unproven, vigilantism.
**Update 1/21– Stratfor adds its voice.

• More on smurfing! In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, a police sergeant in Jefferson County, Missouri (which has, apparently, “led the nation in [meth] lab busts for the past several years”) reveals how smaller US operations are producing more methamphetamine domestically. According to Sergeant Gary Higginbotham, local “smurfers” are paid $50 for purchasing a box of ephedrine or pseudophedrine-containing OTC medicine, and evade federal restrictions on daily and monthly purchases (see the “Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic” Act of 2005) by buying from different retail stores, whose databases aren’t connected.