Daily Archives: August 22, 2021

Just months before the Taliban became an enemy in the war on terror, President George W. Bushs administration declared the fundamentalist rulers of Afghanistan an ally in the global drug war.

In early 2001, narcotics officials in the United States praised a ban on poppy cultivation instituted by the Taliban that appeared to wipe out the worlds largest crop of opium poppies in a years time, even as aerial images raised suspicions about large stockpiles of heroin and opium on Afghanistans northern border. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million gift to the Taliban that was broadly seen as a reward for banning opium cultivation even as farmers were hammered by a drought. Poppies, which produce a sap used to make opium, heroin, and other painkillers, are one of the only Afghan crops that grow well during drought. Observers feared famine would grip the countryside. Meanwhile, critics of the Talibans harsh laws and brutal oppression of women and girls were furious at the Bush administration for supporting the regime.

Taliban leaders declared drug production a violation of Islamic law and promised farmers international aid. Farmers complied out of faith, obedience and fear of going to prison. However, the Talibans motives appeared to be anything but religious. Afghanistan was increasingly seen as a pariah state on the international stage, and the Taliban craved the legitimacy that came with support of the U.S. The ban also drastically inflated the price of opium, allowing the Taliban and other traffickers to liquidate existing stockpiles at a premium.

The ban marked the only time in modern history that any government has stopped poppy farming in Afghanistan, the worlds top supplier of plant-based heroin and opium. U.S. taxpayers spent $8.6 billion on eradication, counter-narcotics and alternative economic development campaigns, but opium production in Afghanistan soared during most of the U.S. occupation. Opium production increased by 37 percent between 2019 and 2020 alone, and the area under cultivation was one of the largest ever recorded, according to the United Nations. Like the global drug war, experts say the drug war in Afghanistan only made heroin and opium more lucrative for warlords and traffickers including the Taliban.

The drug war in Afghanistan was enmeshed within a larger nation-building project and plagued with the same corruption and cultural incompetency that ultimately doomed the $145 billion attempt at forcing the country to become a Western-style democracy. For years, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has served as the governments watchdog and meticulously documented the unraveling of the U.S. mission in regular reports to Congress. In 2018, SIGAR reported that not a single counter-drug program undertaken by the U.S., the Afghan government or coalition allies resulted in a lasting reduction in opium production.

The Afghan anti-drug campaign also mirrored drug wars waged in countries such as Colombia, where U.S.-led efforts to eradicate coca devastated poor farmers and encouraged corruption but did little to snuff out cocaine production, according to Sanho Tree, the director of drug policy at the Institute for Policy Studies.

With the drug war and the war on terror, members of Congress dont tend to be vocal critics of these things, they always vote to support the troops and law and order, Tree said in an interview.

Tree and other experts argue that supply-side military and police interventions have never prevented people from selling and using drugs such as heroin and cocaine. A growing movement of activists and reformers say policymakers should focus on making drug use safer and providing resources to users instead. Today, the vast majority of Americans agree that the drug war has failed, and two-thirds say criminal penalties should be removed for all drugs, not just marijuana.

Tree said the Talibans opium ban backfired as the U.S. invaded in late 2001. The ban devastated rural areas suffering under severe drought, leaving farmers desperate for international relief. The price of opium plummeted as traffickers rushed to empty warehouses full of drugs before U.S. airstrikes and ground troops could reach them.

After the U.S. military overran the Taliban, farmers quickly planted opium again. The British military began paying farmers to destroy their opium crop, an eradication strategy that proved ineffective. Most of Afghanistans opium is sold in Europe and Asia, not the U.S., and the U.S. military was initially wary of undertaking a large-scale opium eradication effort. But by late 2003 it became clear that the Taliban and other insurgents raised revenue from narcotics, and drug trafficking was increasingly seen as a threat to stability. The U.S. appointed a drug czar for Afghanistan and took a lead role in counter-drug efforts, effectively launching a drug war within a military occupation.

Turning farmers away from opium was seen as crucial for establishing the stable, function democracy the U.S. envisioned. However, Tree said prohibition always drives up drug prices, and the crackdown boosted the value of opium for traffickers willing to risk being targeted by the U.S.-led coalition.

When President Bush went after their opium, he made it much easier for the Taliban to fund their war effort, Tree said. They would have to tax less opium to make more money, because the price went up.

Congress soon demanded action on opium, and by 2005, the State Departments narcotics division aggressively pushed the Afghan government to accept the aerial spraying of the crop-killing herbicide glyphosate on poppy fields. The State Departments plan sparked bitter opposition in the Afghan government and at the Department of Defense, which feared the spraying would turn the countryside against the U.S. coalition.

Tree has traveled to Colombia multiple times and observed the U.S.-sponsored aerial spraying campaign targeting coca farms, which he said fueled corruption and was largely ineffective. The U.S. and Colombian governments hoped to eradicate the cocaine supply for narco-traffickers and anti-government guerillas, but rural farmers were devastated and often turned against the government. The Colombian government suspended aerial spraying in 2015 after the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a probable human carcinogen.

What I saw on the faces of these farmers, the rage and frustration and anguish in their eyes, I will never forget, Tree said. What the hell am going to do now, how do I feed my children next week or next month or next year?

Aerial spraying never occurred on a large scale in Afghanistan, but the plan created deep divisions between the coalitions various counter-drug efforts and damaged relations with the Afghan political leadership for years, according to SIGAR. For the remainder of the occupation, debates raged between competing federal agencies, with military leaders arguing that opium eradication weakened counterinsurgency efforts to win hearts and minds. At the same time, drug trafficking and taxes on farmers were fueling the Talibans insurgency, and U.S. contractors and narcotics agencies wanted in on the action.

Under President Obama, the U.S. paused mandatory opium eradication without the consent of local and regional Afghan leaders. The U.S. poured millions of dollars into failed alternative development efforts to replace opium with another crop, but SIGAR reports that the programs lacked oversight and even encouraged opium farming in some cases. Tree said much of the funding was sucked up by military contractors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in a country where the economic and legal systems run on grift and bribes.

The money never reaches the people its supposed to reach, it reaches a lot of contractors with deep pockets and NGOs. The drug wars in Colombia and Afghanistan turned NGOs into a four-letter word, Tree said.

Opium production reached new heights in 2017, and the Trump administration began aerial strikes on suspected drug labs. More than 200 structures were destroyed across the Afghan countryside, but the bombing campaign once again proved the futility of fighting a war on drugs. Mud huts that housed drug labs were easily recreated elsewhere, and an independent forensic analysis concluded that the campaign achieved little besides putting civilian lives at risk and further alienating villagers as the Taliban campaign to retake the country intensified.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency trained two Afghan law enforcement agencies to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, but the elite outfits failed to make a meaningful dent in the drug trade. The amount of opium seized by drug agents since 2008 amounts to only 8 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan in 2019 alone, according to SIGAR. Lawmakers have taken note; funding from Congress for Afghan drug interdiction programs dwindled in recent years until finally reaching zero in 2021.

Tree compared the drug war in Afghanistan to the Afghan security forces that were trained by the U.S. but quickly folded as the Taliban rapidly took control of the country in the past week. The U.S. military and its contractors could report back to Washington that they successfully trained and equipped a certain number of soldiers, but in reality, many chose to strike amnesty deals with the Taliban rather than stay and fight.

What struck me was the metrics they use to monitor to report success in training the Afghan military are very similar to the bullshit metrics that drug warriors use, in that they want metrics that are easy to meet, that are divorced from reality and of little consequence, Tree said.

Such zombie metrics and a revolving door of contractors and personnel help, Tree said, explain why Congress continued funding drug war operations in Afghanistan even as they failed year after year. The global war on drugs has cost the U.S. $1 trillion over the past four decades; the war on Afghan opium alone has cost billions of tax dollars and failed to reduce the supply. Instead, it made the drug trade much more lucrative, which worked out well for the Taliban.

Continued here:

Before 2001 Invasion, Bush Admin Declared Taliban an Ally in the War on Drugs - Truthout

It was a dense, lush sound, one in which you could always find new details but also one where the songs crystallized enough to pull you in right away. For me, the first time I heard Slave Ambient was one of the most random places possible. I had been studying abroad in Shanghai for a few months, and my brother who had just seen the War On Drugs open for the National in New York sent me a few YouTube links to check out. Thanks to a VPN we had installed to bypass Chinese firewalls, it was damn near impossible to load YouTubes, but when I finally heard these songs, I was floored. Maybe a month later, I tracked down a CD copy of Slave Ambient in Sydney, and probably paid something like 25 American dollars for it. (I was a stubbornly late abandoner of physical media.) For almost a week, I walked every inch of Sydney listening to this album, staring at Christmas decorations in the summer and oceans that were such an alien shade of blue they almost seemed psychedelic themselves. I was immersed in this sound, somehow a perfect soundtrack for ambling around a place as foreign and far-flung to me as Australia. But all along the way, Slave Ambient was really beckoning me back home.

For a young classic rocker, the War On Drugs were already easy to love. But for me, having grown up in small-town Pennsyvlania about 90 minutes north of Granduciels home in Philly, their sound felt like mine. In their music, I heard every train graveyard, every dead shopping mall, every collapsing coal breaker, every formerly opulent stone building left to decay in towns long since left behind. Many of Granduciels lyrics on Slave Ambient are little folk echoes, almost placeholders rollin and driftin, looking out past the rubble. Hes been up in the highlands, past the farms and debris. And in all that wreckage, he found something still living, enough that he could breathe a whole different array of colors into it. Driving around Pennsylvania listening to Slave Ambient, the fact that Granduciel could move through those same surroundings and find something new to be pulled up from the ground was more than enough to make you a fan it was inspiring.

It felt like I knew the sound of Slave Ambient somewhere deep down, but at the same time Granduciel articulated it in a way I couldve never imagined myself. Each time a grainy acoustic guitar ran up against a mutating loop, or his earthen voice sang above celestial synths, you could see the past and present and whatever came next mingling freely, a vibrant dream cohering where they all met.

Of course, thats long since become the calling card for the War On Drugs. Throughout, they have been described as classicist musicians tweaking not-exactly-enamored corners of rock history. When Slave Ambients successor Lost In The Dream arrived in 2014, Granduciel built on where hed been before but also crafted a whole new sound. More washed-out and bleary, at times more organic, but still existing in a Technicolor mist only he could see. And if people had tripped over themselves catching all the Springsteen and Dylan DNA on Slave Ambient, the next iteration of the Drugs really sent them reeling. Don Henley? Dire Straits? That whole stretch of years where Boomer musicians tried to keep up with the times, writing dusty rockers dappled with synthesizers? Really?

It was one of the least excavated parts of music history even in a time addled with nostalgic cycles and recurring resurrections. That has remained the path Granduciel has walked since, but at the same time there was always an undercurrent that felt, even as the band garnered runaway acclaim, uncharitable in drawing those comparison points. Granduciel was never exhuming corpses in another revival. From Lost In The Dream onwards, he took the Drugs into a space both watercolor and chiaroscuro, manipulating history to his own liking more than ever before.

And, bizarrely, it brought him greater and greater success. From the very first time we all heard the Woo! in Red Eyes, we knew we were in for something different musically on Lost In The Dream. What was impossible to predict, even then, was the implausible skyrocketing rise of this band matter-of-fact Philly guys playing in a working-class rock tradition turned cosmic, steadily climbing up festival posters until they were Grammy winners and one of the only big new rock bands in an era when big new rock bands are not often a thing. In the wake of Lost In The Dreams true breakthrough, Granduciel signed a two-record deal with Atlantic. The second of those, I Dont Live Here Anymore, comes out in October and if the absolute bangers Granduciel previewed on Instagram last year are anything to go by, it may take the War On Drugs ever further into the stratosphere.

For years, I used to hang on Slave Ambient, this gorgeous and transfixing document of when I first found this new strange sound from this scrappy Philadelphia band. I used to hold it up alongside the much more towering records that followed. But now, revisiting it on the other side of all that, you do have to yield a bit, admit that as wholly unique as Slave Ambient was in its time, it now doesnt quite compare to the peaks Granduciel has scaled since. Its more elusive, more straight-up druggy, without the precise yet blurred balance Granduciel has struck between sharp songcraft and madman sonic wizardry on the subsequent two albums. All these years later, it almost feels more appropriate to group Slave Ambient alongside Wagonwheel Blues as the prologue, the build-up to the War On Drugs becoming what they were supposed to be. Its still a rich, entrancing prologue, but a prologue all the same. Eventually, out past the rubble and up from the waves of ambience, a Woo! would ring out, and there would be no looking back.

Continue reading here:

The War On Drugs 'Slave Ambient' Review: Looking Back 10 Years Later - Stereogum

Despite significant advances made by governments around the world in humanizing drug control systems since the turn of the century, human rights abuses still seem to be taking place in the course of enforcing drug prohibitions in recent years and, in some cases, have only gotten worse.

By Phillip Smith

The United States continues to imprison hundreds of thousands of people for drug offenses and imposes state surveillance (probation and parole) on millions more. The Mexican military rides roughshod over the rule of law, disappearing, torturing, and killing people with impunity as it wages war on (or sometimes works with) the infamous drug cartels. Russia and Southeast Asian countries, meanwhile, hold drug users in treatment centers that are little more than prison camps.

A July virtual event, which ran parallel to the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, shined a harsh light on brutal human rights abuses by the Philippines and Indonesia in the name of the war on drugs and also highlighted one method of combating impunity for drug war crimes: by imposing sanctions.

The event, SDG 16: The Global War on Drugs vs. Rule of Law and Human Rights, was organized by DRCNet Foundation (a sister organization of the Drug Reform Coordination Network/StoptheDrugWar.org), a U.S.-based nonprofit in consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council. The SDG 16 refers to Sustainable Development Goal 16Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutionsof the UNs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Event organizer and DRCNet Foundation executive director David Borden opened the meeting with a discussion about the broad drug policy issues and challenges being witnessed on the global stage.

Drug policy affects and is affected by many of these broad sustainable development goals, he said. One of the very important issues is the shortfall in global AIDS funding, especially in the area of harm reduction programs. Another goalPeace, Justice, and Strong Institutionsis implicated in the Philippines, where President [Rodrigo] Duterte was elected in 2016 and initiated a mass killing campaign admitted by himalthough sometimes denied by his defendersin which the police acknowledged killing over 6,000 people in [anti-drug] operations [since 2016], almost all of whom resisted arrests, according to police reports. NGOs put the true number [of those who were] killed at over 30,000, with many executed by shadowy vigilantes.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has proposed a formal investigation of human rights abuses in the Philippines drug war, but the court seems hampered by a chronic shortfall in funding, Borden pointed out.

Former prosecutors have warned pointedly on multiple occasions of a mismatch between the courts mission and its budget, he said. Recent activity at the conclusion of three different preliminary investigations shows that while the prosecutor in the Philippines moved forward, in both Nigeria and Ukraine, the office concluded there should be formal investigations, but did not [submit] investigation requests, leaving it [up to the] new prosecutors [to do so]. The hope is [that the ICC] will move as expeditiously as possible on the Philippines investigation, but resources will affect that, as will the [Philippine] governments current stance.

The governments current stance is perhaps best illustrated by President Dutertes remarks at his final State of the Nation address on July 26. In his speech, Duterte dared the ICC to record his threats against those who destroy the country with illegal drugs, the Rappler reported. I never deniedand the ICC can record itthose who destroy my country, I will kill you, said Duterte. And those who destroy the young people of my country, I will kill you, because I love my country. He added that pursuing anti-drug strategies through the criminal justice system would take you months and years, and again told police to kill drug users and dealers.

At the virtual event, Philippines human rights attorney Justine Balane, secretary-general of Akbayan Youth, the youth wing of the progressive, democratic socialist Akbayan Citizens Action Party, provided a blunt and chilling update on the Duterte governments bloody five-year-long drug war.

The killings remain widespread, systematic, and ongoing, he said. Weve documented 186 deaths, equal to two a day for the first quarter of the year. Of those, 137 were connected to the Philippine National Police, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, or the armed forces, and 49 were committed by unidentified assailants.

The unidentified assailantsvigilante death squads of shadowy provenanceare responsible for the majority of killings since 2016.

Of the 137 killed, 96 were small-time pushers, highlighting the fact that the drug war is also class warfare targeting small-time pushers or people just caught in the wrong place or wrong time, Balane said.

He also provided an update on the Duterte administrations response to ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensoudas June 14 decision concluding her preliminary examination of human rights abuses in the Philippine drug war with a request to the ICC to open a formal investigation into the situation in the Philippines.

In a bid to fend off the ICC, in 2020, the Philippine Justice Department announced it had created a panel to study the killings carried out by agents of the statepolice or militarybut Balane was critical of these efforts.

[In the second half of 2020], the Justice Department said it had finished the initial investigations, but no complaints or charges were filed, he said. They said it was difficult to find witnesses [who were willing to testify about the killings], but [the victims] families said they were not approached [by the review panel].

The Justice Department is also undercutting the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, an independent constitutional office whose primary mission is to investigate human rights abuses, Balane pointed out.

The Justice Department said the commission would be involved [in the investigation process by the panel], but the commission says [that the] Justice [Department] has yet to clarify its rules and their requests have been left unanswered, Balane said. The commission is the constitutional body tasked to investigate abuses by the armed forces, and they are being excluded by the Justice Department review panel.

The Justice Department review is also barely scraping the surface of the carnage, Balane said, noting that while in May the Philippine National Police (PNP) announced they would be granting the review panel accessto 61 investigationswhich accounts for less than 1 percent of the killings that the government acknowledged were part of the official operations since 2016the PNP has now decreased that number to 53.

The domestic review by [the] Justice [Department] appears influenced by Duterte himself, said Balane. This erodes the credibility of the drug war review by the Justice Department, which is the governments defense for their calls against international human rights mechanisms.

The bottom line, according to Balane, is that the killings continue, they are still systematic, and they are still widespread.

In Indonesiawhere, like Duterte in the Philippines, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) also declared a war on drugs in 2016it is not only extrajudicial killings that are the issue but also the increasing willingness of the government to resort to the death penalty for drug offenses.

Extrajudicial killings [as a result of] the drug war are happening in Indonesia, said Iftitah Sari, a researcher with the Indonesian Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, who cited 99 extrajudicial killings that took place in 2017 and 68 that happened in 2018, with a big jump to 287 from June 2019 through June 2020. She also mentioned another 390 violent drug law enforcement incidents that took place from July 2020 through May 2021, of which an estimated 40 percent are killings.

The problem of extrajudicial killings [in Indonesia] is broader than [just] the war on drugs; we [also] have the problem of police brutality, Sari said. Police have a very broad authority and a lack of accountability. There is no effective oversight mechanism, and there are no developments on this issue because we have no mechanisms to hold [the] police accountable.

Indonesia is also using its courts to kill people. Since 2015, Sari reported, 18 people15 of them foreignershave been executed for drug offenses.

In addition to extrajudicial killings, there is a tendency to use harsher punishment, capital punishment, with the number of death penalties rising since 2016, she said.

Statistics Sari presented bore that out. Death penalty cases jumped from 22 in 2016 to 99 in 2019 and 149 in 2020, according to the figures she provided during the virtual event.

Not only are the courts increasingly handing down death sentences for drug offenses, but defendants are also often faced with human rights abuses within the legal system, Sari said.

Violations of the right to a fair trial are very common in drug-related death penalty cases, she said. There are violations of the right to be free from torture, not [to] be arbitrarily arrested and detained, and of the right to counsel. There are also rights violations during trials, including the lack of the right to cross-examination, the right to non-self-incrimination, trial without undue delay, and denial of an interpreter.

With authoritarian governments such as those in Indonesia and the Philippines providing cover for such human rights abuses in the name of the war on drugs, impunity is a key problem. During the virtual events panel discussion, Scott Johnston, of the U.S.-based nonprofit Human Rights First, discussed one possible way of making human rights abusers pay a price: imposing sanctions, especially under the Global Magnitsky Act.

That U.S. law, originally enacted in 2012 to target Russian officials deemed responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison, was expanded in 2016 to punish human rights violators around the globe by freezing their assets and denying them visas to enter the United States.

In an era [when] rising human rights abuses and also rising impunity for committing those abuses [are] a hallmark of whats happening around the world, we see countries adopting these types of targeted human rights mechanisms [imposing sanctions] at a rate that would have been shocking even five or six years ago, said Johnston. Targeted sanctions [like the Global Magnitsky Act] are those aimed against specific individual actors and entities, as opposed to countrywide embargos, he explained.

The Global Magnitsky program is one such mechanism specifically targeted at human rights abuses and corruption, and the United States has imposed it against some 319 perpetrators of human rights abuses or corruption, Johnston said. (The most recent sanctions imposed under the act include Cuban officials involved in repressing recent protests in Cuba, corrupt Bulgarian officials, and corrupt Guatemalan officials.)

Weve seen a continued emphasis on using these tools in the transition to the Biden administration, with 73 cases [of sanctions having been reported] since Biden took office, he noted.

And it is increasingly not just the United States.

The U.S. was the first country to use this mechanism, but it is spreading, Johnston said. Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, [and] the European Union all have these mechanisms, and Australia, Japan, and New Zealand are all considering them. This is a significant pivot toward increasing multilateral use of these mechanisms.

While getting governments to impose targeted sanctions is not a sure thing, the voices of global civil society can make a difference, Johnston said.

These are wholly discretionary and [it] can be difficult to [ensure that they are] imposed in practice, he said. To give the U.S. government credit, we have seen them really listen to NGOs, and about 35 percent of all sanctions have a basis in complaints [nonprofits] facilitated from civil society groups around the world.

And while such sanctions can be politicized, the United States has imposed them on allied countries, such as members of the Saudi government involved in the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi and in cases of honor killings in Pakistan, Johnston noted.

But we still have never seen them used in the context of the Philippines and Indonesia.

Maybe it is time.

This article was produced by Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Phillip Smith is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a drug policy journalist for more than two decades. He is the longtime writer and editor of the Drug War Chronicle, the online publication of the nonprofit Stop the Drug War, and was the editor of AlterNets coverage of drug policy from 2015 to 2018. He was awarded the Drug Policy Alliances Edwin M. Brecher Award for Excellence in Media in 2013.

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How the Global Drug War's Victims Are Fighting Back - PRESSENZA International News Agency

PART Two

PROVIDENCE It may be a bit risky to write this story; by reading it, you risk becoming complicit in understanding that there are suppressed facts about the U.S. involvement with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, specifically about the production of opium and refining it into heroin, run by the Taliban and allegedly financed by the Pakistani intelligence service, its military and its banks, that has functioned as the financial linchpin of the 20-year war in Afghanistan waged by the U.S., far different from all sorts of false policy and political goals that have been used to rationalize our military presence.

It might be wiser to follow the directive of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who in a poem about the troubles in Northern Ireland, offered the advice: whatever you say, say nothing.

So, yes, writing this story may prove to be risky; my best protection is having you read the story and then share it.

As detailed in PART One, Connecting the Sacklers, Afghanistan and addiction, ConvergenceRI offered a history lesson for those who still pretend to know nothing, recall nothing, and deny everything.

The I do not recall approach by the Sackler family is more than just a legal strategy; it is a refusal to take responsibility for their greed in making billions of dollars in pushing and pimping OxyContin, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. Bankuptcy appears to be a deliberate corporate strategy to evade legal and financial accountability for their actions.

R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha remains one of nine state attorneys general still seeking to hold the Sacklers accountable.

The willful blindness of the Sackler family strikes a resonant chord with the similar I see nothing strategy of the U.S. military and the State Department in ignoring the heroin trafficking business of the Taliban, a tradition of corruption that dates back hundreds of years to the British East India Company in pursuing a global monopoly in pushing opium.

In PART Two, ConvergenceRI conducted an interview with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistans Untold Story, as a way to better understand the history of drug trafficking of heroin by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Stephen Kinzer, the author of The Brothers, about John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, had recommended that ConvergenceRI speak with Gould and Fitzgerald. [They are also the authors of Crossing Zero: The Af/Pak War at the Turning Point of the American Empire.]

In their recent article, President Carter, Do You Swear To Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth? Gould and Fitzgerald lay out the historical framework detailing the strategy of Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to launch a secret program, six months before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, in order to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap. [See link to story below.]

Here is the ConvergenceRI interview with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, talking about the role of heroin trafficking as a geopolitical tactic of intelligence services in what Rudyard Kipling once described as the great game of espionage.

ConvergenceRI: Do you have any questions for me, about ConvergenceRI?GOULD: What brings you to this particular type of story?

ConvergenceRI: I am the editor and publisher of ConvergenceRI, which is a digital news platform published weekly every Monday morning, launched in September of 2013, that covers the convergence of health, science, innovation, technology, research, education, and community, attempting to break down the silos and report on stories across the artificial barriers, the silos, that exist in most news coverage.

I have covered extensively the opioid epidemic, with a focus on the recovery communitys efforts to fashion a different approach around harm reduction.

I have been covering the ongoing legal bankruptcy proceedings against the Sacklers, the family that owns the privately held Purdue Pharma, and their efforts to preserve their wealth by evading future liability from civil litigation.

It struck me what was missing from the stories about what was occurring in Afghanistan, as the U.S. military prepares to leave the country after 20 years of war, was he fact that the Taliban run a huge heroin trafficking operation, which is the basis of their finances, and have done so for years. The Taliban was producing 80 percent of all the heroin supply for Europe and Asia, controlling the growing of opium and its refinement into heroin.

But nowhere has that become part of the story about what went wrong in Afghanistan. There appears to be a similar kind of blindness, if that it the right term, regarding the foreign policy and strategy, about the reasons why we got into Afghanistan, and the role that the CIA had played in the early 1980s in supporting the insurgency against the Russian invasion.

The way I initially found out about the State Department/CIAs involvement was that when I lived in Washington, D.C., I was the editor of Environmental Action Magazine, and I had housemate who worked with the State Department/CIA in Pakistan, who was responsible for funneling weapons and money and who knows what else to the insurgent forces, including Osama Bin Laden in those days.GOULD: What year would that have been?

ConvergenceRI: That would have been 1981, 1982, 1983. He was back in the states in 1984.GOULD: Those were very hot years in that arena.

ConvergenceRI: I had reached out to Stephen Kinzer, because he has written a lot about the world that the CIA and the State Department had played in pushing an agenda overthrowing of governments, both in his book, Overthrow, and again, in The Brothers, looking at the strategic policies of the Dulles brothers.

I thought he might serve as an excellent source for this story. And he, in turn, referred me to you. So, that is how I got to from here to there, and here again.GOULD: Right, right.

FITZGERALD: You know, the whole drug thing is at the core of our new book, the story about the assassination of Adolph Dubs, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan, back in 1979.

GOULD: We got the impression from your note that you were trying to get more details about what happened back in the 1980s.

ConvergenceRI: What is the title of the new book?GOULD: Valediction. It is actually a memoir. But it does lay out of the history associated the drug trades effects on Ambassador Dubs trying to move the whole issue of the Soviet Union and the outcome of trying to stabilize the area.

The drug issue was really an underlying issue all along, but it has never been talked about.

ConvergenceRI: Why has it never been talked about? Is it blindness? Is it because too many people are making too much money?GOULD: It is notorious for basically financing the black projects for the intelligence community.

That is an underlying problem of the whole nature of illegal drugs. That is the BCCI [the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, headquartered in Karachi and London], you know, the Pakistani bank, which was the bank that basically was managing all the drug money during that era. They were the money launderers.

FITZGERALD: They werent the only ones. They were the best known ones. It got to be so lucrative that so many people, at a high level, knew about it, and they just were able to quash any investigation. There were a couple of good books that were written about BCCI.

ConvergenceRI: I am somewhat familiar with those. When I go back into the history, when you look at Vietnam, and you look at the CIA and Air America and the transportation of refined heroin coming out of Laos, you have during the 1980s, in parallel, all the investments that were being made in the Contras were all funded by cocaine trafficking, apparently underwritten by the CIA and the U.S. government.FITZGERALD: There was a major shift at the end of the Vietnam War for the drug industry from Southeast Asia to Southcentral Asia.

That was a major event that occurred. I am sure you have seen the movie, American Gangster. It showed the tail end of U.S. involvement there.

There was a movie made back in the 1980s, Air America, the guy who wrote that screenplay wrote it up beautifully, and then the studio bought it, paid him a million dollars, and told him, We want you to walk away from it.

They turned into a Robert Downey [romantic] fantasy with Mel Gibson.

So, there was very high-level stuff from the very beginning that has been going on in terms of [tamping] down on the real story about what is going on.

A couple of French journalists, back in the 1970s, wrote a very detailed book about how the drug trade was moving from Southeast Asia to Southcentral Asia. I am going to get some quotes; I will be right back.

GOULD: What I think, in terms of our analysis at this point, the drugs, basically, is about finance. No matter what, that is basically the purpose. And, of course, drug addiction is kind of a downstream effect.

You have to sell the drugs to get the money. And obviously, that is what happened.

But I think it is really the U.S. military role in basically facilitating all of the [drug trafficking] activities. That has been going on now for 20 years in Afghanistan.

That is part of the problem, that the [drug trafficking of heroin] is a function of the U.S. military.

ConvergenceRI: Can you assume that the U.S. military at the highest levels knew all about this?GOULD: I cannot say for the record that yes, everyone knew. That I do not know. But the fact that Paul brought up the movie, American Gangster, that was exactly what the point of the whole film was about. You know, that [Frank Lucas, the main character] had a contact in the military, which was helping him get the drugs he needed. That was the level that we are talking about.

How high up the food chain [did it go]? [Was it] on a need-to-know basis? I imagine that there were quite a few people who didnt want to know so they cant be held accountable.

FITZGERALD: We talked to Chuck Cogan, on a couple of occasions, who ran the operations for the CIA from 1979 to 1984 [serving as chief of the Near East and South Asian Division in the CIAs Directorate of Operations], and we asked him about the drug trafficking. He said, of course, there were drugs there; everyone knew that there were drugs there.

Cogan said that that wasnt their goal, and that wasnt what they were directly involved in. The Pakistani ISI [intelligence services] were the ones that were actually running the drugs in the 1980s.

They set up a trucking company, actually. A correspondent from TIME magazine who covered these wars told us, he said, Planes were never empty, flying in and out. They would bring the guns in and they would fly out the heroin.

GOULD: That was one of the functions of the military.

FITZGERALD: There was a woman, Mary McGrory, who was a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Early on, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, she wrote a column for The Boston Globe, in which she said: What is the United States doing supporting all these drug dealers in Afghanistan? Because that is what these so-called freedom fighters are really all about.

And that was one of the few commentaries that was ever written about it, and they started to call her out, saying that she wasnt in possession of her senses, and all kinds of things.

When the boom came down, it came down on us, too. We did a documentary in 1981, and we showed it at the Parker House, and some of the local media and some of the international media were there, too.

And, Theodore Eliot, who was the Ambassador to Afghanistan from the United States, from 1972 until 1978, he came to the event, and he was then the dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he basically said, You are not allowed; who gave you permission to say this? Who gave you permission to actually show this part of the story? You are not allowed to do that.

Right in front of everybody, he embarrassed himself.

GOULD: That was at the end of 1981.

FITZGERALD: If any journalist came out and talked about anything other than the official story about what was really going on, which was basically a fabrication. Then, you know, you were not allowed to profit from your journalism any more.

GOULD: The drugs were always viewed as secondary issues, which was very convenient for keeping a secret, or for keeping it as something not to focus on, as Chuck Cogan said. They knew all about the drugs. But they werent personally involved during the Soviet occupation.

But that, of course, wasnt the case in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, and it certainly wasnt the case during the last 20 years in Afghanistan.

ConvergenceRI: What questions, as a journalist, need to be asked as we move forward? What investigations need to be done? What should journalists be focusing on?GOULD: You are dealing with a problem and a level of corruption that is so total, that actually, the drug issue hasnt really come up, partly because there are so many other complete misrepresentations. And that is part of what our research has been about, being able to track the reality of how the Soviets ended up in Afghanistan, and the role that the Carter administration played.

Yes, so the drug aspect was part of it, there is definitely evidence, in fact, we can send you a paper that we wrote last year, about the Carter administrations active role, in guaranteeing that the Soviets were going to end up in Afghanistan, and ultimately, in what Zbigniew Brzezinski described as their own Vietnam.

The drug aspect is in there, too. It is the story about the Carter official who was trying to control the drugs, and was basically told by the Carter administration that he was not allowed to tinker with any of the issues around drugs. And, he was shot.

So, you have that kind of evidence, where there were officials who did not realize about what some of the underlying objectives were.

Those issues never seemed like the front-end issues. Because the politics, and the military-industrial complex, sucked up all the attention.

FITZGERALD: What you have to realize is that the British East India Company had a monopoly on the opium that they were shipping to China in 1775, before the United States was even a country. The [British] built their empire, Hong Kong was basically established as a banking empire to launder the drug money.

But the fact was, it wasnt illegal at the time. And even when it became illegal, it wasnt illegal because it was immoral, that they were destroying peoples lives, it was because they couldnt tax it.

That is the way that the DEA was setting it up under President Nixon. You had this whole evolution of the anti-drug people, the war on drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency under Nixon, you got this whole process at work, it is like the evolution of an idea, using the cover of morality and the whole chemical thing that drug addiction does to people, but it is really about business, and it is a big business. And it is been around for a long time.

GOULD: The drugs were used to finance black projects, completely with dark money.

Read more:

In Afghanistan, it was a war financed by heroin - convergenceri.com

A visitor to a mock safe injection site set up by SIF MA NOW at Harvard School of Public Health checks out the items on the demonstration table. (Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe / Getty Images)

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Lets give out heroin, for free, to anyone who wants it. This is not a provocation meant to make you gasp or to elicit angry clicksrather, its a proven strategy for reducing the harm of opioids thats already in use in several countries across the globe. We face two drug-related crises in the United States. The first we can all agree on: Drugs are killing people at unprecedented rates. Over 90,000 people die each year from overdoses in the US, an amount that has quintupled since 1999. The second crisis is disputed, but no less deadly: Our drug policy leaves people to fend for themselves, while we waste time and resources.

The carceral solutions dont work, and yet we continue to spend billions of dollars a year on the War on Drugs, attempting to arrest our way out of a public health crisis. But even as some politicians try to shift funding away from policing and prisons, the non-carceral solutions that take their placesending people to rehab and detoxare neither scientific nor effective. In fact, these abstinence-based programs dont just fail to stop the worst outcomes; they greatly increase the risk that opioid users will die. Statistically, its safer to keep using opioids than to go to rehab.

If we want to save hundreds of thousands of lives, we cannot assume that forcing people to stop consuming drugs is the only way forward for everyone. The idea that abstinence works is more about our fear of drugs than it is about science: Rehab programs have an abysmal success rate.

Instead, we must look at the facts. People use opioids like heroin because they are in pain, whether emotional or physical, and until that source of pain is addressed, drug use will continue. Its easy to blame Purdue Pharma for the current crisis, and needless to say, it played a part. But Purdue did not shut down factories in the Rust Belt, render millions of American workers jobless, cause our wages to stagnate for 50 years, or start wars that left tens of thousands of returning veterans injured, traumatized, and alone.The Argument

Until we remedy the trauma of living in our current moment, we must acknowledge that people will seek out drugs to quell their pain. And once we acknowledge this, we must follow the best available science to ensure that drug use is as safe as possible.

For people who want to get off heroin and other opioids, opioid-assisted therapies have proved to be the most effective solution. Giving drug users buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist (meaning it satiates the opioid receptors in your brain but doesnt get you really high), reduces the risk of overdosing by 80 percent. Thats a miraculous result, and yet finding a buprenorphine program is extremely difficult in much of the US.

Decriminalization is also a crucial step forward: It destigmatizes drugs and keeps users out of a cycle of abuse and imprisonment. But decriminalization doesnt address the main cause of opioid deaths: Illegal drugs are unregulated and thus untested, and as a result their strength varies tremendously. Worse, theyre often contaminated with much more dangerous opioids like fentanyl, which now accounts for most opioid overdoses.

Programs in which nonprofits, researchers, or governments simply give people drugs have been piloted in at least six countries, and theyve been successful. A study of a 15-year heroin-assisted treatment program in Swiss prisons, for example, found no deleterious effects; its participants lived and worked just like the rest of the prison population. Current Issue

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In Vancouver, Canada, activists are so convinced that handing out reliable drugs is the only solution to the overdose crisis that theyre doing it themselves, illegally. Eris Nyx, a member of the Drug User Liberation Front, told me that shed seen other interventions fail. So she and other members of the DULF began to buy heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine in bulk, worked with labs to test the supply, and then distributed it for free to people already using the drugs.

The whole crux of this issue is the regime of prohibition, Nyx said. The death is from the volatility in the drug supply, so the fix is to give people drugs with a predictable content.

But the DULFs operation is not ideal. The government is against it, criminal organizations dont like that its giving away drugs, and the group is smallit cant really make a dent in the overdose crisis.

The only solution, Nyx said, is to safely supply drugs and allow them to be distributed in stores. That might seem like a pie-in-the-sky proposal, but we already do it for a drug that kills almost 100,000 Americans a year: alcohol. Were just a few people, and this is a global, UN-level issue, Nyx told me. Im just some person that has watched other people die and wants that to stop.

Continued here:

We Should Hand Out Free Heroin to Drug Users - The Nation

In returning to power in Kabul over the weekend, the Taliban demonstrated both the success of a lightning military offensive against Afghanistans then government, as well as their remarkable resilience in the face of onslaughts by the worlds most powerful military for 20 years.

When they were driven out of Kabul in November 2001, the Taliban had been in power for a little over five years, and in existence for only seven. What makes them the fighting force that outlasted the United States in its longest ever war, and defeated the Afghans who received equipment and training worth over $80 billion from the Americans? Where have the Taliban found the funds to sustain themselves over a two-decade war with an adversary with almost limitless resources?

Flourishing drug trade

In a May 2020 report, the United Nations Security Council estimated that overall Taliban annual combined revenues range from $300 million to upwards of $1.5 billion per annum. It said that while the figures for 2019 were lower, officials were careful to note that the Taliban used resources effectively and efficiently and were not experiencing a cash crisis.

The primary source of the Talibans funds has been the drug trade, as report after report has shown over two decades. Their income suffered in recent years because of the reduction in poppy cultivation and revenue, less taxable income from aid and development projects, and increased spending on governance projects, the UNSC report said.

However, while heroin cultivation and production have provided the bulk of Taliban revenue for many years, the emergence of methamphetamine in Afghanistan is giving impetus to a major new drug industry with significant profit margins, the report noted.

According to the report, interdiction of methamphetamine was first recorded by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2014 (9 kg) and has continued on a sharp upward trajectory, with 650 kg interdicted in the first half of 2019. Methamphetamine, the report said, was stated to be more profitable than heroin because its ingredients are low-cost and it does not require large laboratories.

The Taliban, it said, were reported to be in control of 60 per cent of methamphetamine laboratories in the key producing provinces of Farah and Nimruz.

The report quoted officials as saying the system of heroin smuggling and taxation organised by the Talibanstretched across eight of Nangarhars southern districts from Hisarak to Dur Baba, on the border with Pakistan.

In each district, smugglers paid a tax to district Taliban commanders of 200 Pakistan rupees (approximately $1.30), or its equivalent in afghanis, per kilogram of heroin. Smugglers were provided documentation by each Taliban commander certifying payment of tax before proceeding to the next district and repeating the same process. Afghan officials stated that the smuggling routes thus helped to financially empower each district Taliban commander.

In a report published last year, UNODC said Afghanistan, the country where most opium is produced, which has accounted for approximately 84 per cent of global opium production over the past five years, supplies markets in neighbouring countries, Europe, the Near and Middle East, South Asia and Africa and to a small degree North America (notably Canada) and Oceania.

Mining, taxes, donations

In September 2020, Radio Free Europe reported on a confidential report commissioned by NATO, which concluded that the Taliban has achieved, or is close to achieving, financial and military independence, which enables [it] to self-fund its insurgency without the need for support from governments or citizens of other countries.

Besides the illicit drug trade overseen by Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of Taliban founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, a shadowy figure who is expected to play an important role in the new government the Taliban had expanded its financial power in recent years through increased profits from illegal mining and exports, the report said.

It estimated that the militant movement earned a staggering US $1.6 billion in the year ending March 2020. Of this, $ 416 million came from the drug trade; over $ 450 million from the illegal mining of iron ore, marble, copper, gold, zinc, and rare earth metals; and $ 160 million from extortion and taxes in the areas and on the highways it controlled. It also got $ 240 million in donations, largely from Persian Gulf nations. To launder the money it earned, it imported and exported consumer goods worth $ 240 million. The Taliban also own properties worth $ 80 million in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the report said.

Weapons from Pak and loot

The Taliban do not appear to have had any dearth of weapons to fight the Afghan and US forces. Support from Pakistan has always been key, but the Taliban did not rely on any single source of arms and ammunition.

Journalists such as Gretchen Peters, Steve Coll, and others have repeatedly pointed to the support of the ISI and Pakistan army to the Taliban, directly and through the Haqqani network, a sprawling Islamist mafia based in Pakistans tribal areas and in Afghanistan, comprising fighters, extremist religious schools, and shady businesses with powerful connections to Arab countries in the Gulf and in Pakistan. American leaders and generals have openly accused Pakistan of diverting to the Taliban funds that it received to fight against the fundamentalist movement.

There are other players too. In September 2017, then Afghan Army Chief General Sharif Yaftali told the BBC that he had documents to prove that Iran was supplying weapons and military equipment to the Taliban in western Afghanistan.

A November 2019 report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency noted that since at least 2007, Iran has provided calibrated support including weapons, training, and funding to the Taliban to counter US and Western influence in Afghanistan, combat ISIS-Khorasan, and increase Tehrans influence in any post-reconciliation government.

The US has also accused Russia of supporting the Taliban, but there is little evidence of that.

Beyond these external avenues, the Taliban has also been able to arm itself with the weapons and ammunition that the US has provided to the Afghan forces over the years.

Americas Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a Congress-backed watchdog, noted in an analysis in 2013 that nearly 43 per cent of the firearms 2,03,888 of the 4,74,823 provided to the Afghan forces were unaccounted for. Given the Afghan governments limited ability to account for or properly dispose of these weapons, there is a real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents, which will pose additional risks to US personnel, the ANSF, and Afghan civilians, the analysis said.

US military assets with Taliban

No figures are available for what kind of American military assets, and in what numbers, have fallen into Taliban hands.

The US Government Accountability Office said in a report in 2017 that between 2003 and 2016 the US funded 75,898 vehicles, 5,99,690 weapons, 208 aircraft, and 16,191 pieces of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance equipment for the Afghan forces.

In the last few years, 7,000 machine guns, 4,700 Humvees, and over 20,000 grenades have been given to the Afghan forces, SIGAR data show.

SIGARs July quarterly report mentioned that the Afghan Air Force had a total of 167 aircraft, including jets and helicopters that were usable/in-country as of June 30. This included 23 A-19 aircraft, 10 AC-208 aircraft, 23 C-208 aircraft, and three C-130 aircraft, besides 32 Mi-17, 43 MD-530, and 33 UH-60 helicopters.

On August 17, two days after the Taliban took control of Kabul, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, We dont have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defence materials has gone but certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.

Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans, conflict analysts specialising in modern-day weaponry and military tactics who have worked for websites such as Janes, Bellingcat and NK News, have used open-source intelligence to track the equipment that is proven to have fallen into Talibans hands.

According to them, the Taliban now possess two warjets, 24 helicopters, and seven Boeing Insitu ScanEagle Unmanned Vehicles that were with the Afghan forces earlier. Additionally, according to them, between June and August 14 the Taliban captured 12 tanks, 51 armoured fighting vehicles, 61 artillery and mortar, eight anti-aircraft guns, and 1,980 trucks, jeeps, and vehicles, including over 700 Humvees.

All of this in addition to the fact that the forces of the erstwhile Afghan government have surrendered everywhere in the country and the old Northern Alliance opposition is a shadow of its former self makes the Taliban more powerful than it ever was. It is now much more militarily powerful, Jonathan Schroden, a military operations analyst who directs the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the CNA Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and analysis organization based in Arlington, Virginia, told The Indian Express. It effectively converts them from a lightly armed guerrilla movement to a pseudo-conventional army.

According to Dr Schroden, among the military equipment that the Taliban now has, the D-30 howitzers are probably the most lethal. It is concerning both as a waste of US taxpayer money and as a potential source of weapons for the myriad terrorist groups that have ties to the Taliban, he said.

And there is a non-zero possibility of groups like al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban getting their hands on some of the weapons.

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Explained: How drugs funded the Talibans 20-year war with the US - The Indian Express

Delphine Schrank, The Rebel of Rangoon, (Nation Books, 2016)

Since it staged a coup detat in February, Myanmars military has waged war against the countrys democracy and its own people. It has killed nearly 1,000 civilians and has bombed civilian populations in border areas. It has arrested nearly 8,000 people, including children and family members of dissidents it cannot find. And it has already put Aung San Suu Kyi and the other aging leaders of the National League for Democracy, which routed the armys party for a second straight election in November 2020, on trial. A poet who wrote that the revolution dwells in the heart was arrested and tortured to death. His body returned to his family without his heart.

Some in Myanmar are fighting back. Various armed ethnic insurgencies have stepped up their attacks on government forces. Though it has over 350,000 men under arms, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, is spread thin across multiple fronts. A nationwide civil disobedience movement has confronted the military, bringing the economy, health, and education systems to the brink of collapse. The World Bank is expecting at least an 18 percent contraction of Myanmars gross domestic product in 2021.

Myanmar is on the verge of becoming a failed state. The Tatmadaw is digging in for the long haul, extracting enough rents from oil, gas, gems, timber, and hydroelectricity sales to China and Thailand to enrich itself. And it gets its cut of the surging trade in illicit narcotics from the Golden Triangle region, now among the largest centers of synthetic drug production in the world.

And all of this matters for the United States. While its economy is small, Myanmar is strategically located between India and China. Political unrest is making it a safe haven for drug trafficking, money laundering, and transnational crime. With an underfunded health system on the verge of collapse, Myanmar is now a COVID-19 hotspot. Developments in Myanmar are of immense interest to the geopolitics of Southeast Asia and to policymakers in Beijing and New Delhi.

The Military in Myanmars History

Myanmars military began to dominate the countrys politics soon after it gained independence from Britain in 1948. Gen. Ne Win staged a coup detat in 1962 and implemented the Burmese Way to Socialism. The government nationalized foreign assets; revalued the currency in 45- and 90-kyat notes because Win thought nine was a lucky number, which wiped out savings; and closed off the country to trade and investment. The country was hermetically sealed, leaving the egregious human rights situation largely unreported. In the late 1980s, Wins own generals sidelined him and allowed a brief liberalization. This culminated in the 1990 election that the newly established National League for Democracy won and that the Tatmadaw annulled.

The military junta, officially the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known by its Orwellian acronym SLORC, ran the country into the ground in its own way. Christina Finks brilliant work, Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule, covered just how totalitarian a society Myanmar under the Tatmadaw was.

But under the State Law and Order Restoration Council, there were two distinct changes: The country jettisoned autarky, and the military grew larger. First, in place of the Burmese Way to Socialism, the government embraced crony capitalism. Under this model, the military dominated the countrys natural resources, emerging as the largest economic player as a result.

Second, the council increased the size of the military from 200,000 to over 350,000 personnel. And despite intermittent ceasefires, the State Law and Order Restoration Council was almost always at war with several of the dozens of armed organizations along the countrys periphery. The Tatmadaw waged campaigns, known as the four cuts, a brutal counter-insurgency doctrine that included the targeting of civilians, torture, gang rapes, conscription of civilians as porters, and looting. This was no population-centric strategy; it was a scorched-earth effort to terrorize the population into submission.

At war constantly since 1948, the Tatmadaw cannot claim to have ever defeated an enemy. At best it negotiated ceasefires while setting its sights on the next ethnic group. This perpetual insecurity was exactly what the armed forces wanted. It allowed them to uphold their argument that the country was constantly at threat of breaking apart and that only they could hold it together. This pervasive anxiety allowed them to plunder the natural resources in the restive border regions.

While most international media coverage of Myanmar has always focused on Suu Kyi, the daughter of the countrys founder, she was in some ways an accidental democracy leader. She founded the National League for Democracy while home from the United Kingdom to take care of her ailing mother. Western leaders and journalists all too often personalize these relationships, awed by the tenacity and grace of the woman who was still able to lead her party to elections in 1990 despite being under house arrest. In all she was under house arrest for 17 years, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. To be sure, she has a steely determination and a conviction that she is fulfilling her fathers legacy.

Tepid Efforts to Liberalize

The military eventually made efforts to liberalize the country but always made sure its power was secure. In 2008, it issued a new constitution, which created a pathway to restore civilian governance. But the militarys domination of politics was clear: The constitution had dozens of articles that enshrined its political powers. It awarded the military 25 percent of the seats in parliament and required more than 75 percent of the vote to make any constitutional amendments.

And yet there were some reforms. Elections were held in 2010, although the National League for Democracy boycotted them because of a highly controversial election law that constrained opposition candidates. Reforms still progressed, and in 2015, the National League for Democracy was swept to power in what were deemed free and fair elections. The military ceded some influence, confident that its interests would be protected through block representation in parliament, control of key ministries, immunity from civilian purview of budgets or promotions, a business empire, and ongoing wars.

Once in government, the National League for Democracy proved equally inattentive to human rights concerns as the military. It acquiesced in the militarys genocide of the Rohingya, attacked the free press, and refused to implement the recommendations of independent U.N. and international commissions to provide legal protections and stop the assaults on the unarmed Rohingya community. Suu Kyi defended the Tatmadaw against charges of genocide in a suit brought by Gambia in the Hague.

Despite Suu Kyis help, the military still considered her a threat. In 2019 and 2020, she called for votes to amend the constitution to strip the military of its political power despite the near impossibility of getting it passed. In the November 2020 elections, in an even greater rout than in 2015, the National League for Democracy and allies inched dangerously close to securing 75 percent of seats, which would allow it to amend the constitution. The military declared, without evidence, the results to be fraudulent, and when the league didnt back down, it staged a coup on Feb. 1, 2021.

It is in this context that it is worth reading Delphine Schranks The Rebel of Rangoon. The former Washington Post correspondent based her work, originally published in 2016, on clandestine interviews conducted from 2009 to 2012. The country was still quite closed and xenophobic, and Schrank could operate only on a tourist visa with no protections. She interviewed journalists and activists such as U Win Tin, a political prisoner for 19 years who spanned two distinct generations: The 88 generation, which fled to the jungles or lived in exile after the military annulled the election in 1990, and the 2007 Saffron Revolution generation, which emerged from the State Law and Order Restoration Councils economic incompetence.

By 2007, Myanmar was one of the least developed countries in the world. Botched currency and other reforms led to the collapse of the kyat. Though disastrous for ordinary people, the crisis was no worry for the military, whose rents and ill-gotten gains were all in foreign exchange. Inflation soared, and the price of staples went up, in some cases by 400 percent. People first took to the streets, but the Buddhist monks then took the lead. The saffron-robed monks had every reason to think that security forces would attack civilians, but were confident that the generals would not risk their own karma by ordering troops to open fire on the clergy, their path to attaining merit. Some 30 were gunned down, others were defrocked and arrested, and temples were occupied.

But during the entire Saffron Revolution, the National League for Democracy which at that point was beleaguered and harassed but still a legal entity was absent. This was a popular uprising against a totalitarian regime that the venerable opposition leaders never saw coming and never controlled. Indeed, Suu Kyi, aware of the militarys propensity for force, counseled against popular uprisings.

Schranks book goes into rich detail about how the National League for Democracy is organized, covers debates over timing and tactics, and reveals its inner workings. It covers the critical period after the Saffron Revolution through the decision to boycott the 2010 election and the decision to contest by-elections in 2012. Her work chronicles the incredibly hard work and danger of knitting together disparate groups, generations and factions such as student groups to trade unions into a nationwide party that ultimately defeated the military and gave the country so much hope in 2015 and in 2020.

It reminds the reader that the media pay far too much attention to leaders like Suu Kyi when the real work of politics is done by a coalition of activists working in great danger behind the scenes. Though Suu Kyi is omnipresent in the book, she is referred to as Auntie, a background figure whom the coalition of activists could unify behind.

While the generals factored in a small backlash and anticipated diplomatic opprobrium to their latest coup, they truly underestimated the resilience, courage, and determination of the population that has sustained nearly seven months of opposition to the military. The people benefitted from a decades worth of consistent economic growth, global integration, a freer press, and the proliferation of the internet and social media. They are not giving up 10 years of hard-won economic, civil, legal, and political progress without a fight.

What Happens Next

Rebel of Rangoon says a lot about what we should expect moving forward as the military seeks to entrench itself. Suu Kyi (76) is under arrest and could likely be in custody for the rest of her life. The average age of the majority of the nearly 30 detained senior political leaders is well over 70. The Tatmadaw thinks it can wait out the National League for Democracys leadership to quite literally die out. And it has reason to think that the strategy could work: The league was always a vehicle for Suu Kyi, not a broad-based party. Indeed, it has done a notoriously bad job at cultivating the next generation of leaders. Schrank is very frank about its failing in this regard. And with COVID-19 raging throughout the country and prison system while the military hoards supplies, the Tatmadaw seems to see the pandemic as an opportunity: Several National League for Democracy leaders have died from the virus while incarcerated.

As with the 2007 Saffron Revolution that Schrank chronicles, the current civil disobedience movement is largely leaderless at the national level. A new generation of leaders is being cultivated at the local level. The league is largely decapitated and/or absent. Indeed, Suu Kyis defense of the military for genocide so badly tarnished her that the international community is barely taking note of her arrest and show trial.

The new heroes, if they emerge, will be names that the outside world has never heard of. And given the pervasiveness and resources of the security forces, that is exactly what needs to happen. The National League for Democracys leadership is arrested and simply too stubborn to seek a negotiated offramp. The protests of 2021 have only diminished because of a raging pandemic that has brought the healthcare system to the brink of collapse. And the protestors did so against horrible odds against a regime that has made no secret its willingness to torture detainees to death, engage in collective punishment, raze villages, and gun down unarmed citizens.

More, the collapse of the economy, including the near shutdown of the financial system, the collapse of imports and exports, the mass strikes and walk-offs, and already 20 percent decline of the values of the kyat will continue to fuel the ongoing unrest. With an 18 percent contraction of gross domestic product so far in 2021, the countrys 55 million people are hurtling into poverty.

Many of the leaders of the 88 Generation, the Saffron Revolution, and the founders of the league were activist-journalists. And much of Schranks work focuses on their information campaign, the use of exile media organizations such as the Voice of Democratic Burma, the Irrawaddy, and Radio Free Asia. Schrank chronicles the Tatmadaws military intelligence and Special Branch assaults on the press and the contested space of a new import to the country: cell phones.

Though Myanmars cyber capabilities are significant, there is already evidence that the sheer volume of data that the military intercepts on a daily basis is overwhelming. Encrypted platforms have made the civil disobedience movement possible.

What Schranks book does not address is the complex dynamics of Myanmars various ethnic armed organizations, apart from the degree to which they trained the urban youth of the 88 and Saffron generations. Here, Rebel of Rangoon is less of a guide for a complex landscape today. In the period Schrank covers, the democracy activists are non-violent. That is no longer the case.

An opposition National Unity Government has been established and is operating clandestinely on the ground as the junta fails to provide basic human services. It includes ousted government ministers, but it is more broad-based than the former government. The National Unity Government established the peoples defense forces. With few arms and resources, it has to rely on an alliance of armed ethnic groups, particularly the Karen National Army and the Kachin Independence Army. Schrank rightly notes that the State Law and Order Restoration Council-era military largely kept the armed groups apart from the non-violent democracy activists. Today, the National Unity Government is trying to coordinate the activities of both, with mixed results. They are clearly no match for the Tatmadaw in terms of manpower, training, and resources.

The National Unity government faces headwinds. The Tatmadaw has a 70-year history of divide and conquer, peeling off one opponent after another with promises of autonomy and control over natural resources. As a result, there has never been a strong alliance or any semblance of coordinated operations among the ethnic militias.

Several groups, including two of the best armed and equipped, the Kachin Independence Army and the Karen National Liberation Army, have pledged allegiance to the National Unity Government and stepped up attacks against the Tatmadaw. Other groups, such as the United Wa State Army, see utility in working with a diplomatically isolated and financially desperate military regime. The Wa control the majority of Myanmars illegal methamphetamines and heroin operations, both of which are becoming rapidly more productive, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime.

Still other organizations, such as the Arakan Army, are in flux. They neither condemned the coup nor ended their December 2020 ceasefire. But they have launched a few attacks to send a message that another front would not be in the Tatmadaws interests.

But what is new is that the fight is starting to be taken to the cities itself, with or without the approval of the National Unity Government. There has been a string of urban bombings targeting Tatmadaw forces and facilities near its party headquarters. A dozen pro-junta officials have been assassinated. And yet, the degree to which the National Unity Government has any command and control over this remains unknown. Either way, this campaign of urban violence is clearly one that the Tatmadaw did not anticipate.

Another unknown is the degree of unity among the Tatmadaw leadership. Was the decision to stage the coup broad-based among the senior officer corps? Or was it the decision of just the senior generals, the last gasp of the generation who came of age under military rule, and seek the spoils of that system?

The Tatmadaws officer corps has never split before. Its members live in cantonments, have their own school and university system, their own corporations that employ family members and provide sinecure for retired officers, and their own banks and media. The military works to keep its troops physically separated from the civilian population across all spheres of life.

But is this time different? The economic contraction will hurt the mid-tier officers very hard. Even some of the senior officers are not immune from the collapse of the economy, diminished job prospects for their children, and limited opportunities (if international sanctions start to bite) to travel abroad. Their children are as addicted to their smart phones as everyone else and are likely angered by the regular internet shutdowns.

In short, is the militarys wealth being shared widely enough to maintain unity in the armed forces? If its being concentrated in the hands of a few senior leaders, internal struggles could emerge. The Tatmadaw does have a history of putting some greedy and economically incompetent leaders out to pasture. If thats the case, who is todays Thein Sein searching for an off ramp?

After the coup in February, the Tatmadaw pledged to restore democracy in a years time. It then postponed that to August 2023. The armed forces appear to be adopting the Thai military playbook to cling to power, including the legal dissolution of the National League for Democracy; the arrest, harassment, exile or cooptation of members; the banning of politicians who have criminal records; the use of opaque national security laws; a shift to proportional representation; military appointed commissions; and capture of the judiciary.

Any military-backed government will not placate the population. There are years of underground organizing, party and coalition building ahead, all under very repressive conditions. That will require there to be armies of Rebels of Rangoon.

Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College and an adjunct professor in Georgetown Universitys Security Studies Program. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the opinions of the National War College or Department of Defense.

Image: Xinhua (Photo by Haymhan Aung)

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Authoritarianism and Resistance in Myanmar - War on the Rocks

I was against the wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq from the outset. I said then that we no longer have theaters of war, we have suburban, mall-size, multiplexes of wars, none of which we should be in. And we never know when we are done because we have no clear objective.

Yet again, our politicians, military-industrial complex and Pentagon intelligentsia have come to find out that Afghanistan is not Kansas.

This week, and in much the same manner as Vietnam, the chaotic images of the United States military leaving another unnecessary war that we did not win should cause future generations to reflect on our role and our capacity. Afghanistan has been called the Graveyard of Empires. It essentially defeated the invasions of Great Britain, Russia and now the United States. I think the Taliban should get invited into the Southeastern Conference, just based on strength of schedule.

Considering the disorderly way the crime-ridden city of Atlanta is currently being run, maybe the Taliban could step in and bring some stability and order to that once great city.

Biden looked feckless in withdrawal and predictably blamed Bush and Trump. Then he put Afghanistan on the honor system so he could move on to fight fake domestic wars like the ones on white supremacists, global warming, and others like the war on women, war on black men, war on the middle class, war on poverty, war on drugs, etc. Its easier to say you won fake wars. The only casualty in these fake wars is the truth.

I do not blame the honorable soldiers who fought. I blame a big, unaccountable, incompetent government morass for embroiling us in so many wars based on lies. From the false Gulf of Tonkin attack that got us into the quagmire in Vietnam to the Bay of Pigs; from the Shah of Iran to Iraq (lies about yellow cake and weapons of mass destruction); from Afghanistan (to get bin Laden) to Egypt, Libya and others, the USA just costs itself trillions and never makes the situation better or America safer.

And if you think that fifteen years and trillions of dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan got bin Laden, you are wrong. We found him in his house in Pakistan.

What the USA really needs is someone who can keep order: a strong leader who can keep militant Muslims in line and the oil flowing, stabilize a country, make Shiites and Sunnis get along, keep the Iranians at bay and crack the whip when needed. We did have such a man, Saddam Hussein, but we hanged him a few years back.

Against all reason, America continues to meddle in other countries. In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the basic error we made was believing that tribal governments and local military would fight beside us for our beliefs. These countries have people with values different from ours, and they are not going to fight like we did at Valley Forge or Normandy for ideals. They are goons, thieves and religious zealots who steal our guns and equipment and run away at the first sight of the enemy.

This inept Biden administration handled the withdrawal as you might have expected: terribly. Just a couple of weeks ago Biden said the Afghan government would not fall. His administrations idea of protecting the people in Kabul and other Afghan cities from the marauding rapist Taliban invaders is to make sure they are vaccinated and wearing masks.

Both Republicans and Democrats complained that Biden went on vacation in Delaware during this Taliban takeover. The GOP could not believe Biden would hide during this crisis, and elite liberals were appalled that Biden would vacation in Delaware.

It will give the Biden administration solace that, when the Taliban rolled into Kabul and the U.S. military fled, they found the Critical Race Theory and diversity training documents that our leadership left behind. Those materials will go a long way to inform the Taliban, and the world, just why we lost.

If there is a positive in all these wars of choice for us, it is that we run and abandon billions of dollars of military equipment in these countries, making them reliable customers for replacement parts.

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