Street roots., September 25, 2015, Page 5, Image 5

Street Roots • Sept. 25-Oct. 1,
K,
News
2015
Page 5
drug WAR, from page 5
Capone years. Alcohol is a substance with
problems, but when we tried making it
\th/ Wh°le thing Was worse 1 ^gan
to thmk drugs -yes, there’s some problems
with usage, but the fact that it’s illegal is
what s creating the violence, the gangs
shooting each other over drug turf, the
murders, the stray civilians getting
accidently killed in the middle of all this
mayhem, and it was helping to foster an
underclass, of mostly men, who had no
other real options.
As years went by, I was reading more
about the effects of incarceration - what
does it do to children to have a father not in
the picture? He’s either unmarriageable
because he’s got no income, or even if he is
married to the mother of the children, if
he’s off in jail, here’s the child without a
father in the household, so there’s all kinds
of social pathologies. It all just seemed to
come back to drugs.
r
E.G.: Can you talk about poppy production
tn Afghanistan today and how it fits into the
global drug supply chain?
I»F.. Prior to about 1980, there was very
little poppy production in Afghanistan; it was
mostly in what’s called the Golden Triangle,
Burma, Thailand. Mostly through U.S.
efforts and some economic development,
production of poppy was pushed out of
there. The supply may have been pushed,
but the worldwide demand did not change.
Simultaneously, the Russians invaded
Afghanistan, and with the social breakdown
and lack of government during all those war
years, and a pretty good climate for growing
poppy, all the production moved over to
Afghanistan.
In 2000, the Taliban prohibited poppy
growing, and that sure enough stopped it,
because I think they cut off heads. In
retrospect, it looks like what they were
doing was stockpiling and cornering the
market, which made more profit for them.
Then in 2001, the U.S. comes in. Afghans
thought there was finally going to be some
peace and quiet and economic development
We, maybe with good intentions but
misguidedly, brought a lot. of the warlords
who had been fighting in the 1990s back
into government I think the general
population hoped that they would all be
gone, but we brought them back in because
they caught on real quick that all they had to
do was say, “We’ll fight al-Qaeda for you.”
Governance fairly quickly started falling
apart again, and all this time the worldwide
demand for heroin poppy continued. The
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
statistics, figures from 2009, was that the
worldwide ultimate street value of what
came out of Afghanistan was about $60
billion, and when there’s money like that,
people are going to get in the business. As
breakdown in governance in Afghanistan
continued over the last decade, with little
economic development, poppy is a cash crop
for many farmers. They grow wheat to eat
and poppy for the local saving's account
We made some haphazard efforts to
eradicate poppy, and the Taliban has
stepped up to protect farmers. They also
reportedly tax the poppy trade about 10
percent As governance is deteriorated and
the insurgency has grown, the cycle has
kind of fed on itself. And heroin poppy is a
piece of it, although relatively little of the
"HOTO COURTESY OF INGE FRYKLUND
inge rryklund outside a police station in Kabul,
Afghanistan, on Election Day 2009.
Inge FryHund participates in the ballot fraud investigallnlj^^
Z^ghan prestdenttal election in 2009. The Bend resident is an expert on Afghan
governmental systems and goes overseas frequently to advise the U.S. military.
PARWIZ/REUTERS
A worker in Jalalabad Province, Afghanistan, extracts the sap from an opium poppy.
profits stay inside Afghanistan. And with
something illegal — partly because we’re
there and we insisted it be illegal — it’s led
to a great deal of governmental corruption. I
remember 2011-12,1 was working in
southwestern Afghanistan along with the
(U.S.) Marine Corps, and what I heard from
the Marines is that local Afghans were
paying $150,000 a year to buy the position
of local chief of police. So illegality was
driving governmental corruption and crime
in Afghanistan and helping to fuel this whole
insurgency.
E.G.: What effect is U.S. drug policy having
on its counterterrorism efforts?
I.F.: I think it’s making things more
complicated. There are a number of myths
about this. One is that the poppy trade is
what funds terrorism. When I was with the
Marine Corps, I kept asking people, “What
does it cost for the insurgency to stay in
business?” The highest estimate I ever got
was about $350 million a year. This is
peanuts. We’re spending billions. The
insurgents don’t have much equipment.
They’re all carrying their own AK-47s,
mostly not in uniforms, a lot of them don’t
even have boots; they’re wearing flip-flops.
So it’s a low-budget operation, and yes, they
get money locally wherever they can get it,
and since poppy is the main cash crop and
the word on the street seems to be very
consistent that they’re taxing it 10 percent,
there is some funding of the insurgency. But
if there were no poppy, I think the
insurgency would do just fine.
There is so much money that goes to the
insurgents coming out of Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia - there’s plenty of international
money. But the drug trade undermines*
governance. Afghan citizens seem to be
quite well aware of all this. They know that
local police chiefs are buying their position,
and on the street level, police are, in turn,
extorting citizens at checkpoints. I don’t
know how many different times I saw a
report of Afghans saying, “Gee, it was really
nice of the Americans to build this road for
us, but we can’t drive on it because the
police have put up these road blocks and
extort us, and we have no idea how much
money we’re going to have to pay. At least
the Taliban were pretty reliable at 10
percent”
The insurgency is not so much a direct
result of the drug trade as the drug trade is
driving failures of governance, which in turn
are driving a lot of the anti-government
insurgency.
E.G.: Are we seeing the kind of drugrelated
violence from cartels in Afghanistan that we’re
seeing in Mexico and Central America?
I.F.: No, because the trade is different.
The poppy’s produced by a lot of individual
farmers. Representatives of local drug trade
pick up the product from the farmers.
bundle it; a lot of it goes out through
Pakistan, some goes the northern route
through Tajikistan and into Russia, which is
one of the big customers. But it’s mostly
moved by local tribesman.
It reminded me so much of Chicago drug
gangs. Here’s the Afghan network, and we
were literally mapping these things out
when I was with the Marines. They’re
fighting over a couple square miles of
territory, so they were simply defending
their drug turf. The term “insurgents” or
“Taliban” gets used as a generic
(designation) for people with a whole lot of
different reasons for fighting.
From their perspective, this is simply
trade. They were importing Toyota parts and
exporting heroin poppy. They had nothing
against the Americans. Their only political
agenda was their own independence. This
was a business, and it was well enough
organized, except for these small local
networks fighting over the territory. There
weren’t the cartel problems. Now once the
product left Afghanistan, I don’t know how
much violence there was connected with
that
E.G.: To your knowledge, have we lost any
American service members to conflict that rose
out drug turf disputes or anything like that?
I.F.: During the six months I was in
Helmand (Afghanistan’s largest opium­
producing region) with the Marines, I was
going to two or three ramp ceremonies a
week as bodies were being sent home —
people who had been killed in fighting
around there. And as near as I could teH,
most of the local tribesmen had no interest
in the U.S. one way or the other. We’re on
the other side of the world, and they didn’t
care. But they were fighting with each other.
If we decided that they were insurgents and
started to clear an area out, and people
were tenaciously holding onto their drug
territory, yeah, that’s how we got casualties.
It’s hard to point to any particular death and
say, “This one is due to the war on drugs,”
but if we weren’t there, getting into the
middle of their turf wars, and if our policies.
did not promote this massive corruption
See DRUG WAR, page 7