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The War On Drugs Helps Terrorists
James Joyner and Steven Taylor both write about a Time Magazine story of an Afghan warlord and ally of Taliban leader Mullah Omar who came to the United States in April 2005 prepared to aid the United States in the continued hunt for Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, only to find that the War On (Some) Drugs took precedence over finding the men who conspired to murder 3,000 Americans:
For a week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan’s largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden’s, says he had been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in America’s war on terrorism. “I did not want to be considered an enemy of the United States,” Noorzai told TIME. “I wanted to help the Americans and to help the new government in Afghanistan.”
For several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded–the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents’ satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban’s resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset to the U.S.
He was wrong.
As he got up to leave, ready to be escorted to the airport to catch a flight back to Pakistan, one of the agents in the room told him he wasn’t going anywhere. That agent, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told him that a grand jury had issued a sealed indictment against Noorzai 3 1/2 months earlier and that he was now under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics into the U.S. from Afghanistan. An awkward silence ensued as the words were translated into his native Pashtu. “I did not believe it,” Noorzai later told TIME from his prison cell. “I thought they were joking.” The previous August, an American agent he had met with said the trip to the U.S. would be “like a vacation.”
The intelligence cost to the continuing war in Afghanistan cannot be understated:
Noorzai was also a powerful leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring stability to a region that is spinning out of control. Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding the U.S. and the Afghan governments information; he is not cajoling his tribe to abandon the Taliban and pursue political reconciliation; he is not reaching out to his remaining contacts in the Taliban to push them to cease their struggle. And he is hardly in a position to help persuade his followers to abandon opium production, when the amount of land devoted to growing poppies has risen 60%.
As the article goes on to point out, opium cultivation in Afghanistan has increased dramatically since the fall of the Taliban, and much the money generated from the illegal cultivation and sale of the drug goes to finance the terrorists our soldiers continue to fight today in a war that has largely taken a back seat to the struggle in Iraq.
In the context of the Afghan opium trade, Noorzai was, as Taylor points out, a relatively small fish in a big pond. Sending him to prison will do nothing to stop opium trafficking, but it does remove from the playing field someone who had offerred to become a major intelligence asset in a war against enemies that have repeatedly vowed to destroy us.
Stupid. Just Stupid.
Stupid. Just Stupid.
Agreed. Anne Applebaum has a sensible proposal, but Hey! When has good sense come into play in the War on Drugs?
Comment by Buck — February 14, 2007 @ 2:53 pmIt’s not stupid, the DEA agent is a genius.
Anti Narcotics laws are a giant welfare program conceived originally as an excuse to keep anti-alcohol agents on the payroll after prohibition was repealed.
Every socially negative aspect of the drug trade can be traced to either a puritanical desire to prevent productive people from tuning out, or the violence encouraged by outlawing an industry.
In order to keep the welfare checks coming the DEA and the various other groups of dead-beats need to persuade the populace that the War on Some Drugs is a good idea. Thus, they emphasize and try to escalate the violence, in order to keep the general population in a state of fear.
By arresting this one man, the DEA agent ensured that he would not have to do an honest day’s work in his entire life, and could continue mooching off of the productive classes of society.
Comment by tarran — February 14, 2007 @ 11:23 pmTypical and to be expected. The War on drugs has grown concurrent with the growth of stateless terrorism. They feed each other. and our government absolutely knows this.
The 2004 Congressional Research Service report to congress, “Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat: Causal Links and Implications for Domestic Drug Control Policy” summarized the threat posed by the black market creating ‘illicit’ status of drugs. “The international traffic in illicit drugs contributes to terrorist risk through at least five mechanisms: supplying cash, creating chaos and instability, supporting corruption, providing “cover” and sustaining common infrastructures for illicit activity, and competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention. Of these, cash and chaos are likely to be the two most important.”
Irrationally, that same report then concluded, “American drug policy is not, and should not be, driven entirely, or even
primarily, by the need to reduce the contribution of drug abuse to our vulnerability to terrorist action. There are too many other goals to be served by the drug abuse control effort.”
Well funded stateless terrorism is simply accepted collateral damage of the durg war.
My essay, Plan Colombia: Informed Myopia has more information on these issues.
Comment by Pat Rogers — February 15, 2007 @ 8:29 amOur government has decided that war in the streets in American cities is a reasonable price to pay for the war on drugs. Compared to that, war in somebody else’s country is a small price to pay.
Comment by Nick Kasoff - The Thug Report — February 16, 2007 @ 3:25 pm