How Washington Lost the Ultimate Drug War – LA Progressive

Shouldnt we be amazed? After all, for almost 20 years, the U.S. military has been supporting, equipping, training, and building up the Afghan military to the tune ofmore than $70 billion. The result: a corrupt mess of a force likely to prove incapable of successfully defending the U.S.-backed Afghan state from the Taliban once our troops are gone that is, by thisSeptember 11th.

I mean, what were the odds? All too high, Im afraid, given the U.S. militarys record in Afghanistan and elsewhere in these years. (Think about thecollapseof the American-trained and armed Iraqi military in the face of ISIS in 2014.) In fact, for those of you who are old enough, a few Vietnam War-era bells should already be ringing as well, given the fate of the South Vietnamese military, supported in a similar fashion, once the U.S. pulled out of that conflict.

Recently, threeNew York Timesreporters interviewed Afghan officials and military and police figures across the country andconcludedthat Washington had

produced a troubled set of forces that are woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own Afghan units are rife with corruption, have lost track of the weapons once showered on them by the Pentagon, and in many areas are under constant attack Prospects for improvement are slim, given slumping recruitment, high casualty rates and a Taliban insurgency that is savvy, experienced and well equipped including with weapons originally provided to the Afghan government by the United States.

Consider that also a verdict on the crew that Americas taxpayers have invested in so staggeringly in these years. Im thinking about the Pentagon. In a set of conflicts that used to go under the title of the war on terror, but now are generally just called our forever wars, that military has essentially won nothing and, in return, continues to getever moretaxpayer dollars (just in case you think that only the Afghan military is corrupt).

As the American war in Afghanistan winds down, perhaps the only question is: Whos been on what drugs all these years? Its a subject thatTomDispatchregularand author ofIn the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global PowerAlfred McCoy takes up in his always striking fashion today.

In fact, he offers us a unique look at the Afghan War as, in so many senses and at so many levels, both a drug and a drugged war. In the process, he gives the very word withdrawal new meaning. In his treatment of Americas disastrous Afghan War, he also offers a hint of the striking analysis to come in his new imperial history of the world, his latest Dispatch book due out this fall,To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

Tom EngelhardtEditor, TomDispatch

Many of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one. In a fog between sleeping and waking, youre trying desperately to escape from something awful, some looming threat, but you feel paralyzed. Then, with great relief, you suddenly wake up, covered in sweat. The next night, or the next week, though, that same dream returns.

For politicians of Joe Bidens generation that recurring nightmare was Saigon, 1975. Communist tanks ripping through the streets as friendly forces flee. Thousands of terrified Vietnamese allies pounding at the U.S. Embassys gates. Helicopters plucking Americans and Vietnamese from rooftops and disgorging them on Navy ships. Sailors on those ships, now filled with refugees, shoving those million-dollar helicopters into the sea. The greatest power on Earth sent into the most dismal of defeats.

Back then, everyone in official Washington tried to avoid that nightmare. The White House had already negotiated a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese in 1973 to provide a decent interval between Washingtons withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese capital. As defeat loomed in April 1975, Congress refused to fund any more fighting. A first-term senator then, Biden himselfsaid, The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.Yet it happened anyway. Within weeks, Saigon fell and some 135,000 Vietnamese fled, producing scenes of desperation seared into the conscience of a generation.

Unless the Afghan government were to surrender or somehow persuade the Taliban to share power, the fight for Kabul, whenever it finally occurs, could prove to be far bloodier than the fall of Saigon

Now, as president, by ordering a five-month withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by this September 11th, Biden seems eager to avoid the return of an Afghan version of that very nightmare. Yet that decent interval between Americas retreat and the Talibans future triumph could well prove indecently short.

The Talibans fighters have alreadycapturedmuch of the countryside, reducing control of the American-backed Afghan government in Kabul, the capital, toless than a thirdof all rural districts. Since February, those guerrillas havethreatenedthe countrys major provincial capitals Kandahar, Kunduz, Helmand, and Baghlan drawing the noose ever tighter around those key government bastions. In many provinces, as theNew York Timesreportedrecently, the police presence has already collapsed and the Afghan army seems close behind.

If such trends continue, the Taliban will soon be primed for an attack on Kabul, where U.S. airpower would prove nearly useless in street-to-street fighting. Unless the Afghan government were to surrender or somehow persuade the Taliban to share power, the fight for Kabul, whenever it finally occurs, could prove to be far bloodier than the fall of Saigon a twenty-first-century nightmare of mass flight, devastating destruction, and horrific casualties.

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With Americas nearly 20-year pacification effort there poised at the brink of defeat, isnt it time to ask the question that everyone in official Washington seeks to avoid: How and why did Washington lose its longest war?

First, we need to get rid of the simplistic answer, left over from the Vietnam War, that the U.S. somehow didnt try hard enough. In South Vietnam, a 10-year war, 58,000 American dead, 254,000 South Vietnamese combat deaths, millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian civilian deaths, and a trillion dollars in expenditures seem sufficient in the we tried category. Similarly, in Afghanistan, almost 20 years of fighting, 2,442 American war dead, 69,000 Afghan troop losses, andcostsof more than $2.2 trillion should spare Washington from any charges of cutting and running.

The answer to that critical question lies instead at the juncture of global strategy and gritty local realities on the ground in the opium fields of Afghanistan. During the first two decades of what would actually be a 40-year involvement with that country, a precise alignment of the global and the local gave the U.S. two great victories first, over the Soviet Union in 1989; then, over the Taliban, which governed much of the country in 2001.

During the nearly 20 years of U.S. occupation that followed, however, Washington mismanaged global, regional, and local politics in ways that doomed its pacification effort to certain defeat. As the countryside slipped out of its control and Taliban guerrillas multiplied after 2004, Washington tried everything a trillion-dollar aid program, a 100,000 troop surge, a multi-billion-dollar drug war but none of it worked. Even now, in the midst of a retreat in defeat, official Washington has no clear idea why it ultimately lost this 40-year conflict.

Just four years after the North Vietnamese army rolled into Saigon driving Soviet-made tanks and trucks, Washington decided to even the score by giving Moscow its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. When the Red Army occupied Kabul in December 1979, President Jimmy Carters national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, crafted agrand strategyfor a CIA covert war that would inflict a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union.

Building upon an old U.S. alliance with Pakistan, the CIA worked through that countrys Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI) to deliver millions, then billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistans anti-Soviet guerrillas, known as themujahideen, whose Islamic faith made them formidable fighters. As a master of geopolitics, Brzezinski forged a near-perfect strategic alignment among the U.S., Pakistan, and China for a surrogate conflict against the Soviets. Locked into a bitter rivalry with its neighbor India that erupted in periodic border wars, Pakistan was desperate to please Washington, particularly since, ominously enough, India had only recently tested its first nuclear bomb.

Throughout the long years of the Cold War, Washington was Pakistans main ally, providing ample military aid and tilting its diplomacy to favor that country over India. To shelter beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the Pakistanis were, in turn, willing to risk Moscows ire by serving as the springboard for the CIAs secret war on the Red Army in Afghanistan.

Beneath that grand strategy, there was a grittier reality taking shape on the ground in that country. While themujahideencommanders welcomed the CIAs arms shipments, they also needed funds to sustain their fighters and soon turned to poppy growing and opium trafficking for that. As Washingtons secret war entered its sixth year, aNew York Timescorrespondent travelling through southern Afghanistandiscovereda proliferation of poppy fields that was transforming that arid terrain into the worlds main source of illicit narcotics. We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers, one rebel leader told the reporter.

In fact, caravans carrying CIA arms into Afghanistan often returned to Pakistan loaded with opium sometimes,reportedtheNew York Times,with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance. During the decade of the CIAs secret war there, Afghanistans annual opium harvest soared from a modest 100 tons to a massive 2,000 tons. To process the raw opium into heroin, illicit laboratories opened in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands that, by 1984, supplied a staggering 60% of the U.S. market and 80% of the European one. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addictssurgedfrom almost none at all in 1979 to nearly 1.5 million by 1985.

By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the area around the Khyber Pass inside Pakistan operating under the purview of the ISI. Further south, an Islamist warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIAs favored Afghan asset,controlledseveral heroin refineries that processed much of the opium harvest from the countrys southern provinces. In May 1990, as that secret war was ending, theWashington Postreportedthat American officials had failed to investigate drug dealing by Hekmatyar and his protectors in Pakistans ISI largely because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.

Charles Cogan, director of the CIAs Afghan operation, laterspokefrankly about the Agencys priorities. We didnt really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade, he told an interviewer. I dont think that we need to apologize for this There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.

There was also another kind of real fallout from that secret war, though Cogan didnt mention it. While it was hosting the CIAs covert operation, Pakistan played upon Washingtons dependence and its absorption in its Cold War battle against the Soviets to develop ample fissionable material by 1987 for its own nuclear bomb and, a decade later, to carry out a successful nuclear test thatstunnedIndia and sent strategic shockwaves across South Asia.

Simultaneously, Pakistan was also turning Afghanistan into a virtual client state. For three years following the Soviet retreat in 1989, the CIA and Pakistans ISI continued to collaborate in backing a bid by Hekmatyar to capture Kabul, providing him with enough firepower to shell the capital andslaughtersome 50,000 of its residents. When that failed, from the millions of Afghan refugees inside their borders, the Pakistanis alone formed a new force that came to be called the Taliban sound familiar? and armed them toseizeKabul successfully in 1996.

In the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Washington decided to invade Afghanistan, the same alignment of global strategy and gritty local realities assured it another stunning victory, this time over the Taliban who then ruled most of the country. Although its nuclear arms now lessened its dependence on Washington, Pakistan was still willing to serve as a springboard for the CIAs mobilization of Afghan regional warlords who, in combination with massive U.S. bombing, soon swept the Taliban out of power.

Although American air power readily smashed its armed forces seemingly, then, beyond repair that theocratic regimes real weakness lay in its gross mismanagement of the countrys opium harvest. After taking power in 1996, the Taliban had first doubled the countrys opium crop to an unprecedented4,600 tons, sustaining the economy while providing 75% of the worlds heroin. Four years later, however, the regimes ruling mullahs used their formidable coercive powers to make a bid for international recognition at the U.N. by slashing the countrys opium harvest to a mere185 tons. That decision would plunge millions of farmers into misery and, in the process, reduce the regime to a hollow shell that shattered with the first American bombs.

While the U.S. bombing campaign raged through October 2001, the CIAshipped$70 million in bundled bills into Afghanistan to mobilize its old coalition of tribal warlords for the fight against the Taliban. President George W. Bush would latercelebratethat expenditure as one of historys biggest bargains.

Almost from the start of what became a 20-year American occupation, however, the once-perfect alignment of global and local factors started to break apart for Washington. Even as the Taliban retreated in chaos and consternation, those bargain-basement warlords captured the countryside and promptly presided over a revived opium harvest thatclimbedto 3,600 tons by 2003, or an extraordinary 62% of the countrys gross domestic product (GDP). Four years later, the drug harvest wouldreacha staggering 8,200 tons generating 53% of the countrys GDP, 93% of the worlds illicit heroin, and, above all, ample funds for a revival of yes, you guessed it, the Talibans guerrilla army.

Stunned by the realization that its client regime in Kabul was losing control of the countryside to the once-again opium-funded Taliban, the Bush White House launched a $7-billion drug war that soonsankinto a cesspool of corruption and complex tribal politics. By 2009, the Taliban guerrillas were expanding so rapidly that the new Obama administration opted for a surge of 100,000 U.S. troops there.

By attacking the guerrillas but failing to eradicate the opium harvest that funded their deployment every spring, Obamas surge soon suffered a defeat foretold.

By attacking the guerrillas but failing to eradicate the opium harvest that funded their deployment every spring, Obamas surge soon suffered a defeat foretold. Amid a rapid drawdown of those troops to meet the surges use-by date of December 2014 (as Obama had promised), the Talibanlaunchedthe first of its annual fighting-season offensives that slowly wrested control of significant parts of the countryside from the Afghan military and police.

By 2017, the opium harvest hadclimbedto a new record of 9,000 tons, providing about60% of the fundingfor the Talibans relentless advance. Recognizing the centrality of the drug trade in sustaining the insurgency, the U.S. commanddispatchedF-22 fighters and B-52 bombers to attack the Talibans labs in the countrys heroin heartland. In effect, it was deploying billion-dollar aircraft to destroy what turned out to be 10 mud huts, depriving the Taliban of just$2,800in tax revenues. To anyone paying attention, the absurd asymmetry of that operation revealed that the U.S. military was being decisively outmaneuvered and defeated by the grittiest of local Afghan realities.

At the same time, the geopolitical side of the Afghan equation was turning decisively against the American war effort. With Pakistan moving ever closer to China as a counterweight to its rival India and U.S.-China relations becoming hostile, Washington grew increasingly irritated with Islamabad. At a summit meeting in late 2017, President Trump and Indias Prime Minister Modijoinedwith their Australian and Japanese counterparts to form the Quad (known more formally as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), an incipient alliance aimed at checking Chinas expansion that soon gained substance through joint navalmaneuversin the Indian Ocean.

Within weeks of that meeting, Trump would trash Washingtons 60-year alliance with Pakistan with a single New Years Daytweetclaiming that country had repaid years of generous U.S. aid with nothing but lies & deceit. Almost immediately, Washington announced suspension of its military aid to Pakistan until Islamabad took decisive action against the Taliban and its militant allies.

With Washingtons delicate alignment of global and local forces now fatally misaligned, both Trumps capitulation at peace talks with the Taliban in 2020 and Bidens coming retreat in defeat were preordained. Without access to landlocked Afghanistan from Pakistan, U.S. surveillance drones and fighter-bombers now potentially face a 2,400-mile flight from the nearest bases in the Persian Gulf too far for effective use of airpower to shape events on the ground (though Americas commanders arealready searching desperatelyfor air bases in countries far nearer to Afghanistan to use).

China and the U.S. Struggle over Eurasia, the Epicenter of World Power : For two decades, as China climbed toward global eminence, Washingtons inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. https://t.co/a2L4Nmsszm #china pic.twitter.com/tb7IEfZJCV

Unlike a simple victory, this defeat offers layers of meaning for those with the patience to plumb its lessons. During a government investigation of what went wrong back in 2015, Douglas Lute, an Army general who directed Afghan war policy for the Bush and Obama administrations,observed: We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didnt know what we were doing. With American troops now shaking the dust of Afghanistans arid soil off their boots, future U.S. military operations in that part of the globe are likely to shift offshore as the Navy joins the rest of the Quads flotilla in a bid to check Chinas advance in the Indian Ocean.

Beyond the closed circles of official Washington, this dismal outcome has more disturbing lessons. The many Afghans who believed in Americas democratic promises will join a growing line of abandoned allies, stretching back to the Vietnam era and including, more recently, Kurds, Iraqis, and Somalis, among others. Once the full costs of Washingtons withdrawal from Afghanistan become apparent, the debacle may, not surprisingly, discourage potential future allies from trusting Washingtons word or judgment.

Much as the fall of Saigon made the American people wary of such interventions for more than a decade, so a possible catastrophe in Kabul will likely (one might even say, hopefully) produce a long-term aversion in this country to such future interventions. Just as Saigon, 1975, became the nightmare Americans wished to avoid for at least a decade, so Kabul, 2022, could become an unsettling recurrence that only deepens an American crisis of confidence at home.

When the Red Armys last tanks finally crossed the Friendship Bridge and left Afghanistan in February 1989, that defeat helped precipitate the complete collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its empire within a mere three years. The impact of the coming U.S. retreat in Afghanistan will undoubtedly be far less dramatic. Still, it will be deeply significant. Such a retreat after so many years, with the enemy if not at the gates, then closing in on them, is a clear sign that imperial Washington has reached the very limits of what even the most powerful military on earth can do.

Or put another way, there should be no mistake after those nearly 20 years in Afghanistan. Victory is no longer in the American bloodstream (a lesson that Vietnam somehow did not bring home), though drugs are. The loss of the ultimate drug war was a special kind of imperial disaster, giving withdrawal more than one meaning in 2021. So, it wont be surprising if the departure from that country under such conditions is a signal to allies and enemies alike that Washington hasnt a hope of ordering the world as it wishes anymore and that its once-formidable global hegemony is truly waning.

Alfred W. McCoy

Reposted with permission from TomDispatch

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How Washington Lost the Ultimate Drug War - LA Progressive