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All right, you guys, introducing Alfred McCoy, Professor Alfred McCoy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he is the author, of course, of The Politics of Heroin, and also A Question of Torture, and I'm sorry I forget the other one on torture, and the brand new one, which I have the galleys here.
In the shadows of the American century, the rise and decline of U.S. global power, and you can find him oftentimes at TomDispatch.com, Tom Englehart's site, and we rerun it all at Antiwar.com, of course, as well.
The latest is called Washington's Drug of Choice in the War on Terror.
Welcome back to the show, Alfred.
How are you, sir?
I'm good, Scott.
I hope you're doing well.
I'm doing great, and I really appreciate you joining us on the show again here, and so did you get a copy of my book in the mail yet?
It should have arrived by now, fool's errand.
No, I haven't, but I'm looking forward to it.
Your book on Afghanistan, correct?
Yes, and you're in it.
I rely on you heavily in my heroin section there on the drug wars, and so I wanted to start with something that you had written for Tom Dispatch back when about this that I cite in the book, and that was about how Afghanistan had become a poppy, you know, slash heroin economy in the first place.
It was not traditionally that way.
It was really, I think you say, the ball was was gotten, the ball started rolling back in the 1980s with the CIA and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Pakistan during the war against the Soviet Union.
Is that right?
That's correct.
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration faced two major foreign policy challenges.
One, Central America, the CIA's covert war to overthrow the the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, and second, the Soviet invasion in 1979 of Afghanistan and their subsequent occupation of the country.
And in order to push the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan, the United States mobilized a coalition that backed a group of Mujahideen, the fighters, in Afghanistan for a sustained ten-year struggle against the Soviet occupation.
And whereas the CIA, you know, had ample funds, they couldn't really support this massive popular movement that it took to mobilize the Afghan fighters against the Soviets.
And they then turned to opium.
They imposed a revolutionary attack, attacks on the peasants in the areas under their control, particularly in the Helmand Valley in southern Afghanistan.
And during the course of the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan, the country's poppy production increased from about a hundred tons a year to 2,000 tons.
And that transformed Afghanistan from essentially a regional player producing a small amount of opium to supply of the almost limitless appetite in neighboring Iran, and transformed them into a global player, launching Afghanistan on a path to becoming the world's sole, almost sole, source of illicit heroin supply.
During the 1990s, when Afghanistan then descended into civil war, the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2000, sorry, in 1996.
And until their overthrow in 2001, they were dealing with a country that was absolutely ravaged by this decade of secret war.
There were between 3 and 5 million refugees in a country of about 20 million people.
The war had ravaged the traditional economy.
The snowmelt irrigation systems, the diverse array of crops, had all been pretty much destroyed.
Moreover, Afghanistan had a large flocks of sheep and cattle.
Those had all been killed off by the civil war.
And so under the Taliban, by the late 1990s, the country had virtually become an opium monocrop.
The Taliban turned opium, and then they added heroin production to become the primary source of the finance for their regime.
And then in 2000, the Taliban did a sudden about-face.
They realized that they were diplomatically isolated.
There were only three countries in the world that recognized them.
And they made a bid.
They sent their deputy foreign minister to the UN.
And in order to prepare for sort of a diplomatic campaign to achieve something akin to legitimacy, they conducted a ruthless and massive opium eradication program that cut Afghanistan's opium production from 4,600 tons in 1999 to about 185 tons in two years later.
It was a massive eradication that simply impoverished the peasantry, drove many hundreds of thousands of people into exile, the balance into poverty.
It was kind of an economic suicide that really made the US conquest of Afghanistan in October 2001 rather easy.
And by the time the first US bombs shatter after the events of 9-11, the Taliban was a hollow shell.
And the US launched a lethal combination of massive US airpower and the old Afghani warlords become drug lords.
And together they drove the Taliban out of power.
And they smashed them in what seemed to be on repair or revival.
And so when the United States arrived in Afghanistan back in 2001, the Taliban was broken.
And the drugs were, well, they'd been pushed back to where they'd been before the whole secret war got going, only 185 tons.
And then things changed dramatically.
All right.
So I think the way you characterize it in one of these articles is that there's never really been a full-scale narco state, like not even Colombia or Peru way back when was a real cocaine state in the way that Afghanistan is a narco state.
I mean, it's, well, like three quarters of their entire GDP is just heroin now, right?
Well, it's a little, let's, let's pick things up in 2001.
Okay.
In 2001, so when the United States came into Afghanistan with that operation and then we created the government under Hamid Karzai, the country was ravaged.
The international donors were, had committed funds, insufficient funds as it turned out, but at the time looked like about a hundred billion dollars, you know, commitments to rebuild the country.
So, you know, what happened was, was almost completely unexpected.
Quietly, slowly, the Taliban began rebuilding.
By 2008 or 9, they were, had about 25,000 fighters.
They were challenging the government in rural districts across the country.
By 2015, the Taliban had come back and controlled, according to the United Nations, over half the countryside, had taken many district capitals, and were pounding on the gates of major cities like the Kunduz, a major market town in the north of Afghanistan.
In other words, they were, they were back from the dead.
And there's a lot of possible explanations, but the one that you just can't get away from is the fact that the Taliban captured the illicit opium traffic and they used it to fund their annual springtime offenses against the government.
The, the explosion of public cultivation under the U.S. climate regime was extraordinary.
As I said, in 2001, it was 185 tons.
By 2008, it was up to 8,200 tons.
It was providing, according to the International Monetary Fund, 58%, nearly 60% of the country's gross domestic product came from an illicit commodity.
And Afghanistan was providing over 90% of the world's illicit heroin supply.
So, this was, this was extraordinary.
Afghanistan had become, in effect, a narco-state.
And the drug economy, although it was controlled by the Taliban, still had sufficient funds to corrupt and compromise everybody, including regional warlords out in the countryside.
And the point of comparison is that people remember back in the 1980s and 1990s when cocaine got going in Colombia.
Okay, there were the, the cartels, Pablo Escobar, the massive U.S. drug war that we launched in Colombia, planned Colombia under the Clinton administration, all that.
Well, even at the peak of the Colombian cartels, cocaine represented no more than 3%.
That's 1 to 3% of Colombia's gross domestic product.
In Afghanistan, by 2008, it was nearly 60%.
That's never happened in any country on the planet before.
And this means that this illicit commodity serves to kind of twist or compromise or corrupt almost every single effort in the country.
So, the United States, between about 2002 and 2016, spent a massive, unprecedented $9 billion, you know, in a wide array of opium suppression programs, working with the United Nations, the United Kingdom, other allied countries, in trying to suppress the drug.
And these programs have all failed.
Every single program, because of the predominance of opium in the crop, these otherwise sensible programs, even if they're good programs, got twisted, so they all produced bad outcomes.
The U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan has recently produced a draft report reviewing these disastrous 16 years of U.S. opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan.
What he found is that, first of all, that they had two unexpected outcomes.
The U.S. promoted, along with the U.N., in what's called manual eradication.
We wanted to spray like we had in Colombia, but the Afghan government barred it.
So, they, the U.N. and the Afghan government hired thousands of peasants to march through opium fields and pull up the poppies.
Well, they were then supposed to come in with U.S. aid to provide alternative crops, to, by transition, to tide the farmers through the sudden loss of what was their main cash crop.
What the U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan, Mr. Sopko, found was that there was a complete disconnect between the areas that got the drug eradication and the areas that got, were in remote, rural districts.
The aid that got the rehabilitation aid were generally more prosperous districts, readily accessible right around the major cities.
So, that left the peasants who got their crops torn up angry, bitter with the government and inclined to support the Taliban.
And the other thing that the, that the, that this report by the Inspector General found was that even the more sort of liberal development programs that, you know, everybody right across the spectrum, internationally or domestically in the United States would support, not just the simple rip up the poppies, but real development programs, actually had a paradoxical effect of facilitating increased opium production.
For example, one of the major U.S. initiatives in Kandahar province and in Helmand province, which are these two provinces in the south that are the heart of the opium problem.
They, we introduced massive irrigation programs in Kandahar.
We spent something like 36 million dollars building irrigation.
Well, it turned out that the water can support any crop.
And farmers, of course, use the water to produce the prime crop that will give them the highest return on time and investment.
That's opium.
So, the irrigation produced opium.
They also found that the U.S. attempt to promote food crops, to rebuild the country's food security, which was heavily damaged during that civil war of the 1980s, that we introduced a fertilizer and improved varieties for the basic staple, wheat.
And what the report found is that families were able to produce more wheat on less land, leaving land available to plant opium.
So that all of the U.S. initiatives, whether they're just crude repression or more liberal development programs, have been twisted.
All these good programs have been termed bad by the predominance, the pervasive influence of this illicit economy, this illicit commodity on shaping every aspect of Afghan politics, including the U.S. chances of actually defeating the Taliban.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing they found, too, is that illicit narcotics are a global commodity.
And when you start suppressing production in one part of the globe, it's really rather amazing, even though there are no published reports of prices and the normal market mechanisms of communicating supply and demand around the world don't operate.
But it nonetheless happens.
When you suppress coca or opium in the Andes, then half a world away in Afghanistan, farmers know that the price is up.
And so they produce, they plant more opium in response to, of course, higher prices.
And within Afghanistan, it works as well.
You know, the demand is constant.
Addicts have long term requirement for the drug.
And so when you suppress by ripping up opium in given districts in Afghanistan, all it does is raise the illicit market price and stimulate production in other districts.
Moreover, the other thing that happens that most people aren't aware of is that Afghan farmers, like the coca farmers in the Andes, are generally poor peasants.
They don't have sufficient capital to finance the planting of the crops and living for a year until those crops come in.
So what they do is they go out and they borrow money from merchants who supply the cartels.
And when the U.S. comes in and either defoliate the crop, as we used to do in Colombia, or we rip up the crop, as we've done in Afghanistan, the farmer who has lost his crop has no crop insurance because it's illegal and they don't have that in those areas anyway.
So they owe the money to the merchants who are backed by the lethal cartels.
They've got to pay up.
So the way they pay up is they double down.
They plant enough to pay off the loan that got liquidated by the eradication and enough to get them through another crop year.
So that this is what I call the stimulus of prohibition.
It's the underlying illogic of the entire supply side effort of the drug war that the United States has been fighting.
Well, really, since President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs back in 1971, 72, and in Afghanistan, it's the logic that applies ever since the U.S. intervened in 2002 and began this kind of problematic effort to eradicate the opium.
And, you know, Scott, as bad as we've been, this is one of those areas where, you know, the blame for the incompetence knows no boundaries.
Whether national or transnational, the U.N. office of UNODC, UN Office of Drug Control, played a major role in Afghanistan during this period.
And some of their and the latest report by the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan has some withering words for the U.N. performance.
But under this guy, Antonio Maria Costa, who was a Soviet trained economist and was head of the U.N. of ODC, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, they came up with some absurd ideas.
For example, they had the idea that that poverty and drug production were in no way interrelated.
So you could rip up the poppies without any repercussions of the kind I've just described.
Furthermore, they actually proclaimed back in about 2007, 2008, that they would radically curtail through their programs all opium production in Afghanistan.
And within 10 years, the country would be drug free.
Well, of course, the exact opposite has happened.
So this was a disaster whose makings were not only in U.S. policy, but also allied through NATO and transnational through the United Nations.
The net result is to produce a really resilient opium economy in Afghanistan, the one that the Taliban have captured and the one that they're fighting in Helmand to actually continue to control.
Much of the combat in Afghanistan is fighting for control of the heroin labs in the poppy fields.
You know, it's a it's a drug war of an entirely different kind.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, so when we're talking more than three billion a year, as much as four billion a year.
And when, you know, Google images is lousy with footage or, you know, pictures of American GIs and Marines standing around guarding poppy fields.
It's not just the Taliban who are making all this money.
As you say, there are people on our side of Wally Karzai, the half brother of the president for so many years.
There was the drug kingpin of all of Kandahar province.
And and there's been plenty more who are the governors and the police chiefs and the people that the Americans put in power.
And so, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with tackling the question from this angle, seeing how you're the author of the politics of heroin and everything.
But there are a lot of people who think that this is one of the main reasons that the war is still going on, that all this black market cash money.
It's not just, again, the Taliban making it and it's not just our allies in Afghanistan making it, but it's rich, powerful Westerners who are continuing this policy so that they can funnel that cash into their special projects and that, you know, this is all just part of the game rather than simply bad consequences of the policy all this time.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think, first of all, the drug traffic is pretty much contained and the money from it, at least, you know, in recent years, is pretty much contained between the Persian Gulf and their financial institutions in Afghanistan.
But it is clear that the opium poverty, because it represents such a tremendous amount of Afghanistan's production in 2016, by value represented two thirds of the agricultural production in a country that's predominantly agricultural and the corruption money, the kickbacks, the bribes and all the rest move in two directions.
The Taliban captures the bulk of it, and about 60 percent of the Taliban's budget that it used to pay, you know, 25 or 35,000 fighters every spring, that comes from the opium, but also the money percolates upward from the rural districts through the political system.
It goes to government officials, military commanders, militia commanders, district officials, provincial governors, and it works its way right up into Kabul.
And, you know, being such an enormous share of the country's economy and, you know, the most lucrative share and the most cash rich, it corrupts and compromises everybody in ways that we only partially understand.
People are able to study the Taliban and speculate about it.
You know, the U.S. commander for Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, has said recently that 60 percent of the money that funds the Taliban, the entire organization comes from drugs.
The president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, said in the New York Times recently that without heroin, this war would have been long over.
He said heroin is the driver that's keeping this war going.
And so everybody agrees that it's the drug that's fueling the war.
And what this means is that the whole U.S. effort in Afghanistan, which is, you know, the idea that we're going to send now under President Trump 4,000 more troops, we have about 15 or 16,000 troops in country.
We're pressuring our NATO allies, because this is also a NATO operation, to send more troops as well.
We're increasing our funding for the CIA to send in a major covert operation of the likes of which we have not seen since the Phoenix program of assassination and torture in Vietnam.
They're going to use drones to hit suspected Taliban leaders.
They're going to track down with night raids and commandos ordinary Taliban soldiers and Taliban officers.
So the combination of the conventional and the covert is going to make this major war, arguably the major war so far under the Trump administration.
And the whole thing is basically founded upon the idea that we're going to track down, capture or kill Taliban.
But what this ignores is that every spring in the villages across Afghanistan, there's a whole new generation of kids that are turning 17 and 18.
They're poor, and the Taliban pays about $300 a month for every fighter.
Now, leaving aside all other motivations and complex issues of political loyalty, that cash for teenagers that have no other source of employment is enough to field 25 to 35,000 fighters.
So we can kill off a few hundred of them every fighting season, but there'll be another batch of 17 and 18 year olds.
And as long as the Taliban has that drug money, which it's likely they're going to have for the foreseeable future, as long as the Taliban has that drug money, they can come up with the $90 million a year it takes to field an army of 25,000 fighters.
And they can also come up with about the billion dollars a year it takes to fund their entire operation.
60% of that comes from drugs.
So this means is that, you know, whatever else the drug might mean in Afghanistan, it means that the Taliban has sufficient funds because of their overwhelming control of both poppy fields and the heroin labs to fight and defeat any U.S. intervention.
They can wait us out in a battle of attrition.
They will last longer than we can.
Well, now, when the pro-government factions and even The New York Times had a big piece about how in provinces in the north that have never had poppy production before up there on the Uzbek border and so forth, that they have huge new poppy crops up there as well.
And I wonder whether you think that that means that if the Americans withdrew, that at least the areas in the north would be able to maintain their independence from the Taliban, or do you think the Taliban would take over the whole country again?
Yeah, that's, you know, first of all, the planting of poppy has spread very rapidly in 2017, and we don't have the report in.
Okay, usually the planting and the harvest, it takes place in the first half of the year.
And so the reporting follows along.
What we have is 2016.
In 2016, there was a spread, a near record in terms of the coverage of the number of hectares or acres planted to poppy.
When we arrived in 2001, there were about 8,000 hectares all across Afghanistan planted to poppy.
Last year, 2016, there were probably close to 210,000.
So it went from 8,000 to 210,000.
And people believe that in the 2017 crop, there has been a major expansion.
But so far, the United Nations, which does an annual opium survey, very detailed, very elaborate, district by district, based upon both satellites and actual enumerators who walk the fields, so far that report's not in.
I don't know how far it's spread, but the reports are spreading very rapidly.
But so far, the Taliban has been able to capture the control over both the poppy fields and the heroin refining.
And there's something called the Afghan Interdiction Unit that's funded by US Special Forces.
And they foray out from bases around the country on night raids, riding helicopters, and they knock out the heroin labs.
But these are kind of ramshackle operations that very quickly can be reassembled in another location.
So that's proving futile.
So the Taliban have really got, they've got the, you know, they're developing close to a monopoly on the actual production of the opium because they control the poppy districts, they're under their control, because farmers know that if the government gains control, they're likely to face suppression, so they support the Taliban.
Then they also tax the heroin labs, and it's believed that they have up to 500 heroin labs under their control.
They then have the convoys under their protection.
The merchants who buy the drugs and assemble the convoys move across the landscape under Taliban protection from bandits, raids, and government operations.
And then after that, it gets complicated.
It moves into the international illicit drug network.
But the Taliban have a systematic strategy of trying to move upstream and capture more and more of the value of Afghans' heroin production.
You said that it was around $3 billion, and that's the figure that the U.S. Inspector General uses and most people use, that the Taliban, the crop inside Afghanistan represents $3 billion.
But the actual value in the international market is about $60 billion.
So the Taliban have tried to move upstream by capturing, certainly, heroin production, yet more and more of that $60 billion, keep that in country, use that to fund their insurgency.
The Taliban have, by the way, experts in their ranks who are very skilled in managing the illicit traffic, and that's something they specialize in.
The UN, in one report, said that the Taliban looked like they were degenerating virtually into a drug gang.
Now that, I think, is an overstatement.
But the integration between the Taliban and the traffic is pretty clear.
Well, so they keep sending the Marines to Helmand Province.
And, you know, the story there in Rajiv Chakrasarkaran's book is that, well, the Marines just hate being told what to do by the army, and that also they didn't want to, back in 2009, they didn't want to embarrass the Canadians who were supposedly holding down Kandahar Province.
So they went ahead and decided to make Helmand Province their test case for counterinsurgency with Operation Mashtarak in Marja, which of course failed.
But the Marines did have some, quote, success, not victory, but success in driving off the Taliban for a time.
But of course, as soon as the Marines withdrew, the Taliban took the whole province back over again.
But so, I wonder if you think that that's actually really a part of the strategy in now sending the Marines back to Helmand again, that they really think that this vast agricultural province is really where it's at.
If they can keep the Taliban out of here, they can, you know, deprive them of an important stream of revenue, and that that'll make some difference in the war.
What do you think?
Right now, at this point, there aren't sufficient forces.
That operation you mentioned that ran from 2010 to 2014, focused on Marja, which was the kind of market town that was the epicenter of the opium heroin trade.
At that point, the United States had 20,000 Marines in Helmand Province for a period of four years.
They had 50 heavily fortified bases.
They were backed by up to 10,000 British troops.
So there were 30,000 allied forces.
And according to the Inspector General's report, they cut production in Helmand from about 60% of the province's agricultural land being poppy planted down to about 5%.
And they challenged the Taliban for control over much of the countryside.
And they went beyond that.
The Marines actually had an experimental agricultural program that was administered by combat officers, whereby they provided agricultural inputs to over 1,000 farmers who were willing to sign up for a program in which they move from illegal crops, opium, to legal crops.
And so on balance, you'd have to say that even the Inspector General for Afghanistan, who's devastatingly critical of every other aspect of US policy, says that Marine program worked.
But in 2014, the Marines went home.
And within a year, the Taliban were back stronger than ever before.
They launched an offensive, which have captured most of about 10 of the province's 14 districts.
In the fighting season in 2016, they inflicted 3,000 killed upon Afghan police and army forces.
And they drove them basically into bunkers in the provincial capital and district capitals.
And the Taliban are now stronger in the province than ever before.
And moreover, the farmers are loyal to the Taliban because under the government, what they got was opium eradication and a bungled rehabilitation program or crop substitution program.
So I think the smaller US force, combined with the greatly expanded drug trade and the bitterness of the farmers towards the government for what happened last time the Marines captured control of the province, are all going to make it very, very difficult.
Indeed, there's a veteran British agronomist, a guy named David Mansfield, whose work I cite.
He just did a very detailed report on what happened to what was called the Helmand food zone, which was an integrated anti-narcotics program.
The United States introduced the Helmand province during that period, or actually the period preceding and moving through the Marine occupation and into the post-Marine period.
And what he concluded was that the program has been a massive failure, that the government's chance of wresting control over central Helmand, the key opium districts again, is very remote.
So I don't think, I think that the Trump initiative is going to fail and fail badly.
And it's going to fall on the rocks of that, of 15 years of failed drug programs.
All right.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second again.
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All right.
So in researching for the book, I read about how they just gave up and legalized poppy production in India and in Turkey.
And it worked.
And now virtually all of their crops, it's not that they replaced the crops with something else.
It's just that virtually all of it is now geared toward medicine in the international market.
And so how about that for a solution for Afghanistan?
Well, about 10 years ago, there was a European activist group called the Sinless Council that made a very similar proposal.
In fact, medical morphine is very important for all kinds of things, trauma, automobile accidents, for people recovering from major surgery.
It's used around the globe.
And there's a UN narcotics committee that indeed licenses legal producers of opium.
Tasmania and southern Australia has long been a producer.
Certain districts in India have been registered legal producers.
And back in the 1970s, before the Nixon drug war, something called the Turkish Marketing Organization was a registered and legal supplier for the international pharmaceutical industry.
The problem is that the UN conditions for becoming a legal producer are quite strict.
I mean, let's just look at Tasmania.
They don't do manual harvesting of the opium.
It's all done by machines.
They scoop up the poppy with a machine harvester.
They take the poppy to a plant, and the plant is highly secure, and they crush the poppies and extract the morphine sap from the poppies by machines.
So there's no possibility for diversion.
Moreover, the districts in Tasmania where they produce poppy are incredibly remote.
Other than the southern island of New Zealand, Tasmania is probably the most remote place on the planet.
So it's ideal.
Well, Afghanistan is the exact opposite.
The poppy is proliferated across the country.
There is no security.
The harvesting is done by manual.
If the UN started buying it for the narcotics committee, the traffickers would outbid them.
So the farmers would just take their legal license, and they would use it to produce a kind of a bumper crop for the illegal traffickers.
That's what happened in Turkey, and that's why the Nixon administration, during the first of America's many drug wars, pressured the Turkish government to abolish the Turkish marketing organization and to wipe out the licensed production of opium in Turkey.
The same thing would happen in Afghanistan in a heartbeat.
So that's not really a viable solution.
That's why the proposal by the Sinless Council really didn't get anywhere.
This is one of those situations where an illegal commodity gains sufficient kind of autonomy in order to really shape world politics.
Here we have the United States, still the world's sole superpower, applying massive amounts of military power over the space of 16 years in an attempt to crush the Taliban, and also spending $9 billion in an attempt to wipe out the opium crop that supports the insurgency.
And the complexities of the illicit drug market defeat the world's sole superpower and all of their very sophisticated anti-opium programs, anti-narcotics programs.
I think, Scott, this has implications for the stature of the United States as a global power as well.
Do you want to talk about that a bit?
Be my guest, please.
Well, think about it.
Let me mention again here, and I'm sorry because I haven't read it yet, but it's on my pile.
I'm almost done with the audiobook of my book, and then yours is right at the top of the pile.
It's In the Shadows of the American Century.
In the chapter there, I described how one of the key adjuncts of U.S. global power was covert operations.
Indeed, I said that the covert netherworld and covert operations became the way that the United States mediated the central contradiction of its imperial age.
Back in the age of the British and French Empire, European powers invaded and conquered territories, broke them down into colonies that were under British and French sovereignty and control.
But under the New World Order the United States created in 1945 when we launched the United Nations, we established the idea that a sovereign nation was the logical, rightful order for the entire world, that there should be no colonies or dependencies or protectorates of any sort or description.
Every human being on the planet should be incorporated into a sovereign nation, and a sovereign nation by its very definition had inviolable borders.
So the United States was faced with a central contradiction.
We were the world's hegemon.
We were trying to order and control the world to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
At the same time, we had built a world order of sovereign nations.
So how do you intervene in countries when you can't intervene?
How do you exercise asymmetric power over smaller nations in a world in which you're not supposed to be doing that?
The way to resolve that was covert operations.
We intervened covertly, secretly, under the doctrine of plausible deniability.
If anything was exposed, we'd just deny it because it was all covert.
And this became a key aspect of the U.S. exercise of global power.
And a couple of times during the critical final phase of the Cold War in Central Asia, in Afghanistan, in Central America, in Nicaragua, when the United States was challenged, the CIA was very skillful in responding to the Sandinista capture of Managua and the Soviet occupation of Kabul by unleashing long, very costly covert operations.
We backed the Contras in Central America in a 10-year campaign to push the Sandinistas out of power in Nicaragua.
We backed the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in what became a 10-year campaign between 1979 and 1989 to push the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan.
In order to sustain this resistance for so long, which was incredibly costly, the CIA allowed its local surrogates, the Contras in Nicaragua, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to take over the local drug trafficking.
In the case of the Contras, it was the transit trafficking of cocaine moving from Colombia through Central America to the United States.
In the case of Afghanistan, it was the production of opium and the refining of the opium into heroin for international illicit markets.
And the CIA affected a very skillful convergence between its covert operation and the drug trafficking by its surrogate allies and surrogate armies.
And this gave them the political support and the financial base to sustain a 10-year armed struggle, very costly, very difficult, against these entrenched states.
And in both cases, they won.
In 1991, the Contras and their pressure on the Sandinista government led to a change of government.
The Sandinistas lost power for a time in an election, and a moderate democratic government took power.
The CIA could declare victory, which they did.
And in Afghanistan, it was even more dramatic.
The Soviet Red Army was bloodied in fighting by the Mujahideen.
Season after season after season, in 1989, they finally pulled out and drove back into Uzbekistan.
They left the country.
And, of course, the country descended into civil war, but that's another story.
Now, in both cases, the United States' control over the covert netherworld was so strong that we could control all the variables, including the illicit income from the drug trafficking that our surrogate armies were engaged in, and we could get a kind of complementation between the illicit traffics and the shadow surrogate armies to give them the strength, the resilience to wage 10-year campaigns.
And what's interesting in Afghanistan today is that that's moved beyond our control.
We no longer have control over that covert netherworld.
We haven't been able to control the illicit income that comes from the opium and heroin.
The Taliban, our enemies, have captured that.
And this is one more indication in a changing world of the waning of US global power.
Another that I discussed in the book is surveillance.
So on that point, believe me, I'll give you a second for the, I'll give you time for the other one.
But on that point, you mentioned that the money is basically stuck there in the region.
But on the western edge, you said the Gulf, that's where the money's laundered.
That's where the cash ends up.
So, but in the Gulf, made up of satellites of the United States, what's going on there?
Yeah, that's, I have contacts in the US Treasury Department whose job it was, the Afghan terrorist threat cell was a program launched by the US Treasury Department.
And they had literally hundreds of employees right down to the district level in Afghanistan, walking through poppy fields, trying to figure out where the money was moving.
And they figured out, first of all, that it was that the crop was being financed by what are called Hawala bankers, local financiers in the, you know, in the districts in Afghanistan.
So they attack those, okay, with great vigor.
But then they never really were able to track down fully and to launch a campaign to capture the flow of money, you know, out of Afghanistan to the Gulf.
What they could learn is that was the movement, that's where the money went.
You know, the last time we saw this, by the way, the only time where this has really been exposed was during the 1980s, okay, when the Mujahideen used the opium trade in order to finance their struggle against the Soviet Red Army.
In that case, the opium came across the border into Pakistan, and a number of the Mujahideen fighting for the CIA, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, controlled hundreds of heroin labs.
Okay, but they, you know, when you send money, when you send an illicit drug, whether it's cocaine from Colombia to America, whether it's opium from Afghanistan to Europe and Russia, you get the drugs go out and the money's got to come back some way.
All right?
And there was a bank that was formed in Pakistan called BCCI, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International.
It became a major global bank, and it was kind of an ad hoc Pakistani construction to do the money laundering.
They had branches in the United States.
They had branches in Panama.
They had branches all around the globe, and there were a number of ex-US intelligence officials.
William Colby was an advisor to the bank.
The former secretary of defense was a principal in the bank and its US branch, and it was basically a massive money laundering bank, and it was shut down through investigations globally, destroying a number of careers.
But we haven't seen anything like that this time.
Okay?
So, you know, it's one of those black holes that we don't know about, but it's very difficult to penetrate that realm.
Well, I got to tell you, Alfred, I actually felt like I had just omitted.
I didn't know how to finish up that chapter in the book because I didn't know the answer to the big question that everybody wants to know is where all does that money go, and to what degree is the CIA behind it, just like the bad old days and this kind of thing?
And, you know, I did the best I could with it.
Are you familiar with Peter Dale Scott?
I only know that he's written books on it, but I don't know, you know, exactly where he traces the money to.
But, yeah, it seems like there must be BCCIs involved here that I just, I don't know.
Maybe you're right.
Maybe it really is that far out of the control of the West now that there's not one that includes the Americans and their European friends in this game.
The Gulf has emerged as not only a major center for air transport, finance, but also for banking.
And there are, you know, all kinds of Middle Eastern banks that are popping up that are fueled by, first of all, the oil money.
But, you know, they're outside the rubric of the oversight and control of Western banks.
And so, you know, we don't have the leverage.
The thing that gave us the leverage with BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, back in the 1980s and early 1990s when that thing was unraveled, was that it became an international bank.
So it had offices in the Cayman Islands, in Panama, in Washington, D.C., in Europe.
And by that, by expanding internationally, they came under the rubric, under the investigation of authorities in that area.
So in the Cayman Islands, for example, that's a British overseas territory.
The attorney general at the time was actually my brother-in-law, who's now passed away.
He got knighted for cracking down, in part, on money laundering by BCCI in the Cayman Islands branch and shutting down that branch.
And there were investigations.
The U.S. Justice Department investigated Clark Clifford, former Secretary of Defense, his compromised relationship with BCCI.
And there were parallel investigations like that around the globe.
But it was the international branches in properly regulated economies, Australia, United States, even Panama, Cayman Islands to a certain extent, that unraveled that mystery.
Well, we haven't had anything like that today.
So I agree, Scott.
It's sort of a black hole.
Yeah.
Well, I guess my idea was, if anybody knows, it's you.
But I guess we're going to find out, though.
Yeah, that's a knotty problem.
From the point of view of regularizing and normalizing the Afghan economy, there is one sign of progress.
As I said, back in 2008, 58% of the gross domestic product of Afghanistan came from an illicit commodity, opium.
Two years ago, it was down to 13%.
And today, probably it's less than 10%.
Now, opium has remained large.
It's bigger than ever before.
But what's happened, of course, is that Afghanistan has developed elsewhere.
They've got cell phone industries.
They've got media.
Commerce has revived.
They've got some international trade.
There's some possibility of mining.
So probably the long-term solution is just to work with the international community in building up the regular Afghan economy to the point where opium drops down to 2% or 3% of gross domestic product as it was in Colombia.
Right.
But of course, that's impossible as long as there's no security, right?
That would take mining and all these kind of big long-term investments and projects that are impossible in the current situation.
It's difficult, but if the Taliban expands, they now have over half the countryside.
If they're fighting attacks on those projects, yes, that will become difficult.
But nonetheless, the economy has developed.
There's no question about it.
Much of that prosperity is concentrated in Kabul, the capital.
But there has been some progress.
So if there's a solution, and I'm not sure there is one, over the long term, and I mean 10 or 20 years, the solution is to continue to support the development of the Afghan economy.
Alternative crops, commerce, training people to move into other areas beyond primary production.
And it's possible for some kind of progress.
But it's not going to happen within the life of the Trump administration, either first term or should there be a second term, that won't happen.
And so in terms of a U.S. intervention in Pakistan, you know, for the next four or even eight years, there will be sufficient illicit heroin by anybody's judgment to keep funding the Taliban and keep funding those, fielding those 25 to 35,000 fighters.
And that will not stop.
And that, I think, preordains any U.S. military intervention in the country to failure.
All right.
Well, those chimes means I got to go.
Mean.
Sorry.
Those chimes mean I got to go.
Thanks very much for your time, Alfred.
Great to talk to you again, sir.
It's been wonderful talking to you.
Bye bye now.
All right, you guys, that is the great Alfred McCoy.
He wrote The Politics of Heroin about all these same sorts of doings back in the days of Vietnam.
And also he wrote A Question of Torture.
As far as I know, and I've read a lot of them, the most important book about the torture regime that you could read.
And then this one is called In the Shad.
And there's another one about torture, too.
I just forget the name.
But read them both.
And then this one is called In the Shadows of the American Century, the Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.
Brand new out by the great Alfred McCoy.
I'm Scott Horton.
You know the deal.
Check out all my stuff at foolserend.us for the book.
Buy my book, foolserend.us.
And scotthorton.org for 4,500 interviews and to sign up for the podcast feed.
And antiwar.com for all the viewpoints I want you to read.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Oh yeah, and I run an institute.
The Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
You'd think that'd be on the top of the list, maybe.
But anyway, it's a long list.
Thanks very much, guys, for listening.
