Category: Perspectives

The Middle East and North Africa will not be immune from the shockwaves of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West.

The rapid evolution of the conflict, with its military, economic and humanitarian manifestations, has caught the world by surprise. It was even more so in Arab countries, which were fundamentally ill-prepared to deal with any contingencies challenging their own precarious balance.

In many regards, if no remedial and preventive actions are taken, the Ukraine conflict could very much exacerbate the region’s already volatile and complicated situation.

This is especially the case in the economic field.

Many of the MENA countries had been already struggling to curtail the financial fallout of the pandemic now find themselves dealing with a new and unprecedented economic crisis.

The prospect of sharp hikes in energy and wheat prices as well as the possible disruption of food supplies will, in various degrees, affect countries in the region. For the more vulnerable of the MENA countries, the situation could even lead to a new wave of social unrest reminiscent of the violent uprisings that shook the Arab world during the last decade.

Food security in the region is also at risk. Economically-challenged countries in MENA, such as Syria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Yemen, are exposed to the adverse impact of food and grain price hikes and shortages. But the poorer segments of all the region’s populations stand to lose even more than others.

Most Arab countries are major importers of food staples. Egypt is the world largest wheat importer with 80% of its supplies coming from Russia and Ukraine. Lebanon imports 60% of its wheat from Ukraine. Tunisia was already witnessing food price rises and supply disruption even before the start of war. The country imports 50% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

The other obvious economic implication of the war for the MENA region is its impact on the energy market. Oil and gas producing countries, such as Algeria, Libya and the Arab Gulf states, are likely to benefit from the surge of energy prices as they will most probably be called upon to step in the vacuum left by Russia after EU and US sanctions. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or even Libya, do have the capacity to pump more oil. They are likely, however, to maintain a delicate geostrategic balance when determining their policy on oil and gas prices and output.

A number of other Arab countries including Tunisia, Lebanon and Morocco, are net energy importers. They will need to find ways to assume the burden of financing unexpected heavy fuel bills in the future. Energy price hikes will push up inflation rates and potentially ratchet up social tensions.

Politically, changes are likely to affect the wider picture of relations with Europe and the US. The region, already coping with Washington’s geostrategic disengagement, may need to prepare for a diminishing European interest in Euro-Med partnerships, as European attention turns to consolidating strategic alliances within the continent itself. This new focus is likely to mean greater military and economic expenditures will be allocated to help with reconstruction in Eastern Europe. Fewer resources are therefore likely to be available for regional development projects and North-South integration.

This shift could also mean that the attention Europeans give their neighbours south of the Mediterranean will be self-servingly limited to combating illegal immigration and terrorism. The drive for reform, political or economic, will be put on the back-burner. Countries amid democratic transitions could be left to grapple with their own turbulent processes as their regional partners are busy with other priorities elsewhere.

But the West’s need for more oil and gas output is also likely to give Middle East and North African exporters more leverage and relieve them from European and US pressures for reform.

It is quite difficult to imagine a scenario in which the war in Ukraine will not adversely affect international efforts to resolve conflicts in the region. The war in Ukraine is surely going to increase instability of the MENA region rather than advance the agenda for peace.

A war in the heart of Europe risks relegating MENA conflicts to the back-burner. Multilateral institutions, especially the UN Security Council, already deeply divided on how to solve regional conflicts, particularly in Libya, Syria and Yemen, could find themselves unable to contribute to conflict settlement. Wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen could be left to local and sub-regional protagonists to handle.

Russia’s role in the region is also likely to change. Instability in the Middle East will be bigger problem for Europe than it is for Russia. With the exception of Syria and Iran, where Moscow has vested strategic interests, Russia could play the role of spoiler rather than an active peace builder, especially if it feels its vital interests to be in jeopardy. Moscow’s most recent obstructive move during the Iran deal

talks offers an indication of what to expect from a Russia under Western siege.

The rapidly deteriorating relations between Russia and the West will have their own impact on multilateral efforts to deal with various ongoing conflicts across the region. It will certainly widen the chasm within the UN Security Council, making it difficult if not impossible to reach any consensus among the P5 on possible settlement of crises in the MENA region.

It may be too soon to fully assess the real impact of the war on Arab-West relations and Euro-Med cooperation in particular. But there might be reason for hope. The current situation could offer an opportunity for leaders from the two shores of the Mediterranean, once a truce is in effect, to reflect together on the shortcomings of the past process and to explore new ways of cooperation in renewable energy, green economy and near sourcing.

For Arab countries, it is time to reassess and recalibrate all past calculations so as to adjust to unfolding changes. Pan-Arab regional institutions should be keener on closer cooperation amidst the current crisis. Having failed to coordinate their efforts to meet the challenge of the pandemic, they may not have now the luxury of ignoring the disastrous impact of the Ukraine war on their food security and their own stability at home.

The reality the US is stuck with is that its global system of economic, political and military control is ever more precipitously disintegrating.

The Soviet collapse signaled the end of not just Marxism-Leninism as a political force, but western Liberalism itself.

In historical terms, the twentieth century could be said to have been relatively short in that its defining events happened closer to each other in time, certainly in comparison to the ‘long’ 16th and 19th centuries. 1914 is typically taken to be the beginning of this period, given the outbreak of the First World War, setting in motion everything that was to follow, the carnage of the trenches, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression and the Second World War, the second act of what began in 1914.

Europe emerged from 1945 in ruins and no longer dictating the world’s destiny for the first time in five centuries. In its place, the globe was divided between two supposedly ‘anti-colonial’ powers, the USA and USSR, championing their own versions of national self-determination and economic ‘modernization’ within the context of a worldwide ideological struggle between their respective national religions.

For the American-led west, this religion was Liberalism, a political response to the democratic movements of the 19th century that declared the “ignorant herd”, in other words the majority of the populace, to be unqualified and unsafe decision makers for society. Direct participation in the national political life was to be limited to a privileged clique of qualified technocrats; the social scientists, the journalistic class, and captains of industry and their lobbyists serving as the titular heads of the approved political parties.

In opposition to this ideology, we are told, was Marxism-Leninism as promulgated by the leadership of the Soviet Union where power was held by a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of the Communist Party leadership. The great mass of society, it was concluded, had to be led by force, through what were thought to be the inevitable stages of economic development culminating in socialism on the ever-receding horizon. One of the many perversities of the twentieth century was the creation of much the same exploitation of labor and environmental destruction under the pretext of eventually transcending it.

Beneath the rhetorical differences, the two ideologies were more alike than different in the ways they functioned in the real world and especially in the assumptions they had about how much of society was qualified to have a political voice. The late American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, in his post-mortem of the USSR in ‘After Liberalism’ went so far as to claim that they were one and the same ideology. Going still further, he asserted that in the Cold War, the USSR acted as a de-facto American proxy in the way that it steered potentially dangerous third world nationalisms into a more politically attractive variant of western Liberalism, maintaining their country’s place in the existing world system.

Where mass-movements escaped the control of either superpower as in Civil-war era Spain, the Maoist seizure of power in China or the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the superpowers invariably found themselves both trying to sustain the forces of the status-quo.

Of course, we well know that this highly constrained system of governing the world did not last. The Cold War, and by extension the historical twentieth century, came to an abrupt end in 1989. In a state of internal disintegration, the USSR withdrew in humiliation from the quagmire of Afghanistan and then from its own designated sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, allowing its satellites in East Germany, Poland, Romania, and others to be overthrown. Such was its state of collapse that it did not survive long enough to be digested by Western capital. The Union, stripped of its empire, disintegrated in the second half of 1991, its last leader Mikhail Gorbachev resigning in disgrace and declaring the Soviet Union dissolved on Christmas Day.

Exactly 30 years have now passed since the death of the only power ever credibly presented as a challenger to the United States and 33 years since the end of the post-World War II global order and the twentieth century as a whole. Still all these years later, these momentous events, unforeseen by the Western security and military establishments, are still paraded as the final triumph of the western capitalist system and the dawn of a new unipolar American century.

With the benefits of hindsight, it is understandable that people would have interpreted events in that way. Since the onset of near permanent economic crisis in 2008, the deeply divisive Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016, Wallerstein’s prognoses seem ever more eerily prescient. Rather than being the defeat of an alternative to western Liberalism, the fall of Marxism-Leninism as a viable political system signalled the beginning of the end of the West’s ideological hegemony. Into the ideological vacuum of the former Soviet Union has flowed all manner of radical, democratic, neofascist, indigenist, and nationalist political movements. From the Zapatista uprising against NAFTA in 1994, to the birth of the nascent pan-Islamic, pan-Arabist Ansar Allah Movement in Northern Yemen the same year to the return of narrow European nationalisms, the rising anti-systemic movements are far less co-optable by the global North since they generally reject the basic assumptions of Liberalism that have gone unchallenged for some two centuries.

The American-led west has spent the last 30 years scrambling to find a substitute for the ‘communist menace’ with which it justified its global military, economic, and cultural footprint. From 2001 up to around the election of Donald Trump the chosen enemy was “Islamist terrorism”, a conveniently vacuous category that swept up all religiously oriented Arab and Islamic popular movements of which Washington disapproved. Since 2016, the United States seems to have been pivoting to its old red-baiting tactics surrounding non-existent or inconsequential Russian and Chinese ‘interference’ in western elections. The Biden administration may well believe that US hegemony will rest more securely on a Cold War 2.0 and a theatrical power-struggle with China and Russia. The world, however, has not and will not return to the world of pre-1989. Russia is a shadow of its Soviet incarnation and a strategic threat to the west insofar as it continues to be cornered by NATO. Meanwhile, China remains deeply enmeshed within the global capitalist system which the US principally constructed.
Finally, the degree of internal division and unrest in the US itself negates the possibility of returning to the old Liberal consensus, however much Biden may fancy himself another FDR or LBJ. With a previously unthinkable number of Americans questioning the legitimacy of their own elections, the inexorable centrifugal forces that tore the communist world apart and are now clawing at the EU have finally reached the heart of the global capitalist system itself.

If the United States could wish about its ideal century, it would be a renewed Cold War against Moscow and Beijing. The reality it is stuck with is that its global system of economic, political and military control is ever more precipitously disintegrating.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Will Tunisia, the countries of the Maghreb and the Sahel and Sahara region be entitled to a period of stability, economic recovery, sustainable development and democratization?

This question was recently addressed by around thirty Tunisian, Maghreb and Euro-Mediterranean experts, during a conference-debate on the upcoming elections in Libya and the geostrategic effects of the new conflicts between Rabat and Algiers.

Participated in this conference – debate of experts from the Averroès center for Arab-African strategic studies, from the association “Tunisie Compétences” and from “NDAW” (Network of Democrats of the Arab World, the “Network of Democrats of the Arab World” “).

The presentations and discussions focused on the regional and global dimensions of the new political, security and geostrategic conflicts in Libya, in the Maghreb, Sahel and African Sahara regions and in the Mediterranean.

“Report” of the elections in Libya

Speakers confirmed that internal and international conflicts in Libya are worsening and risk causing the “postponement” or even cancellation of the presidential and legislative elections scheduled for December 24, 2021.

According to the majority of experts, this is a “proxy war” whose fate is linked to the military, security and political conflicts which have paralyzed most of the countries of the “greater Middle East” for twenty years and especially since. 2011 and the outbreak of the “Arab revolutions”.

Internal, regional and international conflicts of interest risk to abort the “political resolution processes” of “civil wars” in Libya and in other countries of the region, notably in Tunisia, the “destabilization” of which would have an impact. . very dangerous for its neighbors and for the whole Euro-Mediterranean region.

No description available.

Interference

These same conflicts of interest complicate the differences and tensions between the countries of the Maghreb, the Sahel region and the Sahara. They accelerate “foreign interference” and the risks of new tensions, in particular between Morocco and Algeria, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Djibouti or between Egypt and Ethiopia. …

The participants explained the involvement of dozens of countries around the world in international conferences on the conflicts in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Mali, etc. by the “divergences” and “new conflicts of interest” between them. main foreign players in these countries, including France, Russia, China, Turkey, the United States, the Gulf countries and Israel.

Algiers-Rabat conflicts

The risks of instability and insecurity have increased after the emergence of new tensions between Algeria and Morocco and the rise in tensions in Mali, south of the Sahara and in the eastern Mediterranean between the major European capitals, Ankra, Beijing, Moscow and Washington.

Moroccan and Algerian speakers noted the gaps by analyzing the emergence of the new tension between Rabat and Algiers and the causes of the new security threats.

However, the majority of speakers called for a high-level Algerian-Moroccan political dialogue to avoid all scenarios of the outbreak of an “armed confrontation”, the opening of borders and the revival of bilateral and regional cooperation.

No description available.

For the Libyan dossier, the speakers recommended to the political decision-makers of the countries of the Maghreb, the Arab world and the Euro-Mediterranean region to “overcome their classic quarrels” and their “proxy wars” to succeed in playing a role in life. Politics. to treat. then at the stage of “reconstruction” and “reinvestment”. Otherwise the big world capitals will have the last word and will have the opportunity to marginalize the neighboring countries of Libya in the “next big markets”.

Calls were made for the evacuation of foreign forces and militias established throughout Libyan territory, while strengthening security and preventive measures to prevent the “flight” of mercenaries and terrorists to Tunisia and others. neighboring Libyan countries. .

However, international engagement with political and democratic processes in Libya could be an opportunity not only for the Libyan people, but also for Tunisia and the region.

There’s a problem with the way Iran is being made out to be in terms of the revival of the Vienna Talks. This isn’t new, of course. It’s part of the anti-Iran narrative that’s been espoused since the Iranian Revolution, but ever since the end of the 6th round of talks, Iran has been portrayed as a country that is unreasonably intransigent in its dealings with the E3 and the US and unwilling to engage in dialogue.

Reality disagrees, however. Iran’s approach to the talks stems from its tried and tested distrust toward the West. Be it imperialism, occupation, massacres, coerced monopolies, or military and security interventions, Iran has been subjected to them all in modern times, and these are all matters very much alive in the Iranian collective memory.

The distrust is real, grounded, and based on experience. If anything, Iran has shown a great deal of pragmatism and diplomatic know-how in its talks with the West over the past 42 years. The JCPOA bespeaks the country’s willingness to hold dialogue with international peers.

So how did we get from former President Rouhani’s optimism vis-à-vis a possible revival of the deal to the talks being delayed time and time again until the end of November?

The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the world’s illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said to directly employ around half a million people.

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

“In order to finance the resistance for a protracted period, the Mujahideen had to come up with a livelihood beyond the weapons that the CIA was providing,” McCoy said, noting that the weapons issued could not feed the fighters’ families, nor reimburse them for lost labor:

So what the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium — 100 tons per annum — had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade”.

The CIA achieved its goal of giving the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam, the Soviets failing to quash the Mujahideen rebellion by the time they finally pulled out in 1989. But American money and weapons also turned Afghanistan into a dangerously unstable place full of warring factions that used opium to fund their battles for internal supremacy. By 1999, annual production had risen to 4,600 tons. The Taliban eventually emerged as the dominant force in the country and attempted to gain international legitimacy by stamping out the trade.

In this, they were remarkably successful. A 2000 ban on opium cultivation by the Taliban-led government led to an almost overnight drop to just 185 tons harvested the following year, as frightened farmers chose not to risk attracting their wrath.

The Taliban had hoped that the eradication program would win favor in Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But unfortunately, history had other ideas. On September 11, 2001, the U.S. experienced a massive case of blowback, as Bin Laden’s forces launched attacks on New York and Washington. The U.S. ignored the Taliban’s offer to hand him over to a third party, instead opting to invade the country. Less than a month after the planes hit the World Trade Center, U.S. troops were patrolling the fields of Afghanistan.

The world’s first true narco-state

The effect of the occupation was to expand drug production to unprecedented new proportions, Afghanistan becoming, in Professor McCoy’s estimation, the world’s first true narco-state. McCoy notes that by 2008, opium was responsible for well over half of the country’s gross domestic product. By comparison, even in Colombia’s darkest days, cocaine accounted for only 3% of its GDP.

Today, the United Nations estimates that around 6,300 tons of opium (and rising) is produced yearly, with 224,000 hectares — an area almost the size of Rhode Island — planted with poppy fields.

But even while it was financing a widespread and deadly aerial spraying campaign in Colombia, the United States refused to countenance the same policy in Afghanistan. “We cannot be in a situation where we remove the only source of income of people who live in the second poorest country in the world without being able to provide them with an alternative,” said NATO spokesman James Appathurai.

Not everyone agreed, however, that a passionate commitment to defending the quality of life of the poorest was the actual reason for rejecting the policy. Matthew Hoh, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps is one skeptic. Hoh told MintPress that airborne fumigation was not carried out because it would be outside the control of Afghan government officials, who were deeply implicated in the drug trade, owning poppy fields and production plants themselves. “They were afraid that, if they went to aerial eradication, the U.S. pilots would just eradicate willy nilly and a lot of their own poppy fields would be hit.” In 2009, Hoh resigned in protest from his position at the State Department in Zabul Province over the government’s continued occupation of Afghanistan. He told MintPress:

NATO forces were more or less guarding poppy fields and poppy production, under the guise of counterinsurgency. The logic was ‘we don’t want to take away the livelihoods of the people.’ But really, what we were doing at that point was protecting the wealth of our friends in power in Afghanistan”.

According to Hoh, there was widespread disillusionment within the military among service members who had to risk their lives on a day to day basis. “What are we doing here? This is bullshit,” was a common sentiment among the rank and file.

The heroin trade implicated virtually everyone in power, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, among the biggest and most notorious drug kingpins in the south of the country, a man widely understood to be in the pay of the CIA.

U.S. attempts to stymie the opium trade, such as the policy of paying domestic militias to destroy poppy fields, often backfired. Locals came up with ways of profiting, such as refraining from planting in one area, collecting large sums of money from occupying forces, and using that cash to plant elsewhere — effectively getting paid both to plant and not to plant. Even worse, local warlords and drug bosses would destroy their rivals’ crops and collect money from the U.S. for doing so, leaving themselves both enriched and in a stronger position than before, having gained NATO forces’ favor.

One notable example of this is local strongman Gul Agha Sherzai, who eradicated his competitors’ crops in Nangarhar Province (while quietly leaving his own in Kandahar Province untouched). But all the U.S. saw was a local politician seemingly committed to stamping out an illegal drug trade. They therefore showered him with money and other privileges. “We literally gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition,” Hoh said. “If you were going to write a movie about this, they’d say ‘This is too far fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.’ But that is the way it is”.

McCoy noted that the Taliban was one of the prime beneficiaries of the drug trade, and used it to increase their power and vanquish the U.S.:

That booming opium production, and the U.S. failure to curb it, provided the bulk of the financing for Taliban, who captured a significant but unknown share of the local profits from the drug traffic, which they used to fund guerrilla operations over the past 20 years, becoming a determinative factor in the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan”.

‘The needle and the damage done’

It is not particularly difficult to grow opium. Opium poppies flourish in warm and dry conditions, away from the damp and the wind. Consequently, they have found a fertile home across much of central and western Asia. The plant has flourished in Afghanistan, particularly in southern provinces like Helmand, close to the tripoint where Afghanistan meets Pakistan and Iran. Much of the irrigation system in Helmand was underwritten by USAID, an organization that acts as the CIA’s public-facing front. In full bloom, the poppy fields look spectacular, with beautiful flowers of vibrant pink, red or white. Underneath the flowers, one can find a large seed pod. Farmers harvest these, draining them of a sap which dries into a resin. This is often transported out of the country through the so-called “Southern Route” via Pakistan or Iran. But, as with any pipeline, much of the product is spilled along the way, causing an epidemic of addiction across the region.

The effect on the Afghan population has been nothing short of a disaster. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of adult drug users jumped from 900,000 to 2.4 million, according to the United Nations, which estimates that almost one in three households are directly affected by addiction. While Afghanistan also produces copious amounts of marijuana and methamphetamine, opioids are the drug of choice for most, with around 9% of the adult population (and a growing number of children) addicted to them. Added to this has been a spike in HIV cases, as users share needles, Professor Julien Mercille, author of “Cruel Harvest: U.S. Intervention in the Afghan Drug Trade,” told MintPress.

Only contributing further to the despair has been 20 years of war and U.S. occupation. The number of Afghans living in poverty rose from 9.1 million in 2007 to 19.3 million in 2016. A recent poll conducted by Gallup found that Afghans are the saddest people on Earth, with nearly nine in ten respondents “suffering” and zero percent of the population “thriving,” in their own words. When asked to rate their lives out of a score of ten, Afghans gave an average answer of 2.7, a record low for any country studied. Worse still, when asked to predict the quality of their life in five years, the mean answer was even lower: 2.3.

The effects of the CIA operation to bleed the Soviets dry in Afghanistan have also produced a humanitarian crisis in neighboring Pakistan. As McCoy noted, in the late 1970s, Pakistan had barely any heroin addicts. But by 1985, Pakistani government statistics reported over 1.2 million, turning the two nations into “the global epicenter of the drugs trade” almost overnight.

The problem has only grown since. A 2013 U.N. report estimated that almost 7 million Pakistanis use drugs, with 4.25 million requiring urgent treatment for dependency issues. Nearly 2.5 million of these people were abusing heroin or other opioids. Around 700 people die every day from overdoses. The highest rate of dependency is, unsurprisingly, in provinces on the Afghan border where heroin is manufactured. The same U.N. study notes that 11% of people in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa use illicit substances — primarily heroin.

The drug crisis, of course, is also a medical crisis, with overstretched public hospitals filled with drugs-related maladies. The social stigma of addiction has ripped families apart while the money and power illicit drugs have brought has turned many towns into hotspots of violence.

Iran has a similar number of opioid users, generally estimated at between two and three million. In towns close to the Afghan/Pakistani border, a gram of opium can be bought with loose change — between a quarter and fifty cents. Thus, despite the extremely harsh penalties for drug possession and distribution on the official books, the country has the highest addiction rate in the world

On a micro level, addiction tears apart families and ruins lives. On an international scale, however, the opium boom has placed an entire region under significant strain. Therefore, one consequence of U.S. policy in the Middle East — from supporting jihadists to occupying nations — has been to unleash a worldwide opium addiction that has made a few people fantastically wealthy and destroyed the lives of tens of millions.

Domestic despair

The boom in production has also led to a worldwide disaster. In the past decade, opioid-related deaths increased by 71% globally, according to the United Nations. Much of the product grown by Afghan warlords ends up on Western streets. “I don’t see how it can be a coincidence that you have that explosive growth in poppy production in Afghanistan and then you have the worldwide opioid epidemic,” Hoh stated, a connection that raises the question of whether users in Berlin, Boston, or Brazil should be seen as victims of the war in Afghanistan as much as fallen soldiers are. If so, the numbers would be staggering. Nearly 841,000 Americans have died of a drug overdose since the war in Afghanistan began, including more than 70,000 in 2019 alone. The majority of these have involved opioids.

Officially, the DEA claims that essentially all illicit opioids entering the U.S. are grown in Latin America. Hoh, however, finds this unconvincing. “When you look at their own information and their reports on the illicit opioid production hectarage in Mexico and South America, it is clear that there is not enough production in the Western hemisphere to meet the demand for illicit opiates in the U.S.,” he told MintPress.

A dirty history

The U.S. government has a long history of directly involving itself with the worldwide narcotics trade. In Colombia, it worked with President Alvaro Uribe on a nationwide drug war, even as internal U.S. documents identified Uribe as one of the nation’s most important drug traffickers, an employee of the infamous Medellin Cartel and a “close personal friend” of drugs kingpin Pablo Escobar. Profits from drug-running funded Uribe’s election runs in 2002 and 2006.

General Manuel Noriega was also a key ally of the U.S. For many years, the Panamanian was on the CIA payroll — despite Washington knowing he was involved in drug trafficking since at least 1972. When he became de facto dictator of Panama in 1984, little changed. But the director of the Drug Enforcement Agency initially praised him for his “vigorous anti-drug trafficking policy.” Eventually, however, the U.S. decided to invade the country and capture Noriega, sentencing him to 40 years in federal prison for drug crimes largely committed while he was still in the CIA’s pay.

At the same time as this was going on, investigative journalist Gary Webb exposed how the CIA helped fund its dirty war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of crack cocaine to black neighborhoods across the United States, linking far-right paramilitary armies with U.S. drug kingpins like Rick Ross.

To this day, the U.S. government continues to support Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernandez, despite the president’s well-established connections to the cocaine trade. Earlier this year, a U.S. court sentenced Hernandez’s brother Tony to life in prison for international drug smuggling, while Juan himself was an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Nevertheless, President Hernandez has proven himself effective at suppressing the anti-imperialist Left inside his country and cementing the U.S.-backed 2009 military coup, one reason he is unlikely to face charges in the near future.

Using the illegal drug trade and the profits from it to fund imperial objectives has been a constant of great empires going back centuries. For instance, in the 1940s and 1950s, the French Empire utilized opium crops in the so-called “Golden Triangle” region of Indochina in order to help beat back a growing Vietnamese independence movement. Going further back, the British used its opium machine to subdue and economically conquer much of China. Britain’s insatiable thirst for Chinese tea was beginning to bankrupt the country, as the Chinese would accept only gold or silver as payment. It therefore used the power of its navy to force China to cede Hong Kong, from which Britain began flooding China with opium it grew in its possessions in South Asia.

The humanitarian impact of the Opium War was staggering. By 1880, the British were inundating China with over 6,500 tons of opium every year — equivalent to many billions of doses, causing massive social and economic dislocation as China struggled to cope with a crippling, empire-wide addiction. Today, many Chinese still refer to the era as “the century of humiliation.” In India and Pakistan, too, the effect was no less dramatic, as colonists forced farmers into planting inedible poppy fields (and, later, tea) rather than subsistence crops, causing waves of huge famines, the frequency of which had never been seen before.

Millions of losers

The story is much more nuanced than some “CIA controls the world’s drugs” conspiracy theories make out. There are no U.S. soldiers loading up Afghan carts with opium. However, many commanders are knowingly enabling warlords who do. “The U.S. military and CIA bear a large responsibility for the opium production boom in Afghanistan,” Professor Mercille said, explaining:

Post-9/11, they basically allied themselves with a lot of Afghan strongmen and warlords who happened to be involved in some way in drug production and trafficking. Those individuals were acting as local allies for the U.S. and NATO, and therefore were largely protected from retribution or arrest for drug trafficking because they were U.S. allies”.

From the ground, the war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites, which immediately begin to embezzle the massive profits that quietly disappear into black holes. All the while, millions of people pay the price, suffering inside a militarized death zone and turning to drugs as a coping mechanism. In the story of the opium boom, there are few winners, but there are millions of losers.