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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Alfred McCoy's important new article for TomDispatch (March 30, 2010) deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America's ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title – “Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State? – is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding “No! “… not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies both of Washington and of Kabul.
1 Eventually the United States and its allies gave Hekmatyar, who for a time became arguably the world's leading drug trafficker, more than $1 billion in armaments. This was more than any other CIA client has ever received, before or since.
2 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 74-75: “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, said by the 911 Commission to have been the true author of the 9/11 plot, first conceived of it when he was with Abdul Sayyaf, a leader with whom bin Laden was still at odds [9/11 Commission Report, 145-50]. Meanwhile several of the men convicted of blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, and the subsequent New York “day of terror “plot in 1995, had trained, fought with, or raised money for, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Tim Weiner, “Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield, “New York Times, March 13, 1994].
3 Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008
4 New York Times, October 27, 2009.
5 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536. At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies” (Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia [New York: Viking, 2008], 320).
6 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), 239. Cf. New York Times, October 28, 2009.
7 Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December 2009, 1.
8 The alert reader will notice that even $3.4 billion is less than 53 percent of the $10 billion attributed in the previous paragraph to the total Afghan GDP. These estimates from diverse sources are not precise, and cannot be expected to jibe perfectly.
9 “Afghanistan: Drug Industry and Counter-Narcotics Policy,” Report to the World Bank, November 28, 2006, emphasis added.
10 London Daily Mail. July 21, 2007. In December 2009 Harper's published a detailed essay on Colonel Abdul Razik, “the master of Spin Boldak,” a drug trafficker and Karzai ally whose rise was “abetted by a ring of crooked officials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as by overstretched NATO commanders who found his control over a key border town useful in their war against the Taliban” (Matthieu Aikins, “The Master of Spin Boldak,” Harper's Magazine, December 2009).
11 James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: “United States military commanders have told Congress that…only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”
12 Corey Flintoff, “Combating Afghanistan's Opium Problem Through Legalization,” NPR, December 22, 2005.
13 CBS News April 1, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/01/world/main6353224.shtml.
14 Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal Attaché Gordon McGinley to Justice Department, in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36.
15 Scott, Deep Politics, 105; quoting from San Diego Union, 3/26/82.
16 Fueling America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA's Global Drug Connection (in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield).
17 Time, November 29, 1993: “The shipments continued, however, until Guillen tried to send in 3,373 lbs. of cocaine at once. The DEA, watching closely, stopped it and pounced.” Cf. New York Times, November 23, 1996 (“one ton”).
18 CBS News Transcripts, 60 MINUTES, November 21, 1993.
19 Wall Stree Journal, November 22, 1996. I suspect that the CIA approved the import of cocaine less “as a way of gathering information” than as a way of affecting market share of the cocaine trade in the country of origin, Colombia. In the 1990s CIA and JSOC were involved in the elimination of Colombian drug pingpin Pablo Escobar, a feat achieved with the assistance of Colombia's Cali Cartel and the AUC terrorist death squad of Carlos Castaño. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 86-88.
20 Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela's Hugo Chávez?” Global Research, April 19, 2007.
21 Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 400; Time, November 23, 1993. McFarlin had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980's. The CIA station chief in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, also retired.
22 The Bank of Boston laundered as much as $2 million from the trafficker Gennaro Angiulo, and eventually paid a fine of $500,000 (New York Times, February 22, 1985; Eduardo Varela-Cid, Hidden Fortunes: Drug Money, Cartels and the Elite Banks [Sunny Isles Beach, FL: El Cid Editor, 1999]). Cf. Asad Ismi, “The Canadian Connection: Drugs, Money Laundering and Canadian Banks,” Asadismi.ws: “Ninety-one percent of the $197 billion spent on cocaine in the U.S. stays there, and American banks launder $100 billion of drug money every year. Those identified as money laundering conduits include the Bank of Boston, Republic National Bank of New York, Landmark First National Bank, Great American Bank, People's Liberty Bank and Trust Co. of Kentucky, and Riggs National Bank of Washington. Citibank helped Raul Salinas (the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas) move millions of dollars out of Mexico into secret Swiss bank accounts under false names.”
23 Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor,” Observer, December 13, 2009.
24 Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 357.
25 Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 373-77.
26 Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 449.
27 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2003), 461; citing interview with Dr. David Musto.
28 David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980; quoted in McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 462.
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