The disaster that is the 'war on drugs'

When the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Sir Ian Gilmore, calls for an end to the state’s prohibition of drug use, acknowledging that the policy has failed abysmally, you can guess what the official reaction will be.

So no prizes for those who thought that a spokesperson for the Home Office would say: "Drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis are extremely harmful and can cause misery to communities across the country. The government does not believe that decriminalisation is the right approach.” That’s been the line for 40 years since doctors were banned from prescribing heroin to patients under laws passed by the Labour government of 1966-70.

Farewell emails are more often than not best forgotten. But Sir Ian’s missive to the 25,000 members of the august RCP certainly wasn’t. He told them: “I personally back the chairman of the UK Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, when he calls for drug laws to be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use. This could drastically reduce crime and improve health."

He endorsed a recent article in the British Medical Journal by Stephen Rolles, from the think tank Transform Drug Policy Foundation. This demonstrated in a comprehensive and conclusive way that the policy of prohibition had harmed public health, encouraged organised crime and fuelled corruption. It’s a conclusion reached by many official reports, including one by the Police Foundation as long ago as 1999.

And as last night’s Channel 4’s brilliant, eye-opening documentary, Birth of a narco-state, by Angus Macqueen, revealed, prohibition carried into foreign policy by the US and Britain has had a disastrous effect on Afghanistan. Attempts to prevent poor farmers growing poppies has helped create a state dominated by the drugs mafia at the very highest levels. Naturally, the Taleban also uses heroin smuggling to fund its cause. As a result, half of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is from the drugs trade and bribery of state officials. About 90% of heroin on Britain’s streets is Afghan, smuggled into the country through Iran and Turkey.

Globalisation has created an international, large-scale business in drugs, which operates like any other industry. The market is highly competitive, which ensures that prices remain low and within reach of most sections in society. Between a third and a half of theft and burglary is estimated to be drug-related. The illegal drug market is estimated to be worth between £4bn and £6.6bn a year. As a report by the Royal Society of Arts acknowledged: “There is no reason to think that the illegal drugs business and its accompanying market can simply be closed down. Certainly all efforts so far to close them down have been dismal and often expensive failures.”

The sharp rise in the use of drugs in society is undoubtedly connected to increased levels of alienation produced by the intense, consumer-oriented society. The market economy depends to a greater extent on low-wage, flexible labour and destroys more skilled jobs than it creates. Many working-class communities are deprived of job opportunities that are both sustainable and meaningful. These deep structural inequalities are, of course, insoluble as far as capitalism is concerned.

In his BMJ article, Rolles calls for regulation in place of prohibition and says it would be far cheaper than the ever increasing resources currently directed into efforts to control supply. But a huge state apparatus has grown up around the “war on drugs”, both domestic and military. Its perpetuation serves to sustain a draconian control over sections of society, especially young people, to the point where it has become self-justifying. Getting off the drugs merry-go-round and abandoning prohibition, will require a real dose of democracy that takes us beyond the present state of affairs.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

US and Pakistan military - a deadly embrace

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s current visit to Britain must be one of the most unfortunate ever by a head of state. He has rightly come under fire for lavish junketing while millions of his people are suffering from the worst floods for nearly a century.

In addition, Zardari’s meeting with Cameron behind closed doors this Friday is bedevilled by the Prime Minister’s remark that Pakistan should not be “allowed to look both ways” or be permitted to “promote the export of terror”. Cameron, who remains unrepentant, has himself been attacked by Tory grandee Lord Tebbit who has accused him of running “a sloppy, slap-happy government” a propos these remarks.

Just another spat between the old and new Tories? No, this runs far deeper. Cameron in fact provided a glimpse into the deadly embrace that is the reality of Pakistan’s relationship with the United States and Britain.

The heated exchanges between Cameron and Zardari come hot on the heels of the WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary affair. The 91,000 reports from US military units in the field, embassies, intelligence officers and informers have been denounced as fabrications by Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

An astonishing investigation by veteran reporter Christina Lamb in last weekend’s Sunday Times provides chapter and verse about the real nature of this sinister body. Lamb, who was twice expelled from Pakistan after pre-dawn raids on her, first in on her flat in Islamabad and later in Quetta, explains how and why Pakistan’s military intelligence has become the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice and the ultimate nightmare for both the US and Britain.

As Lamb points out, the WikiLeaks documents show that “Pakistan has been accepting billions in US aid while ISI, its military intelligence service, had been arming and sheltering members of the Taliban. The man who headed ISI during the height of this activity was none other than Kayani.”

Kayani is none other than General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, who, Lamb says, is the “real power in the country”. She was present on Kayani’s C17 executive jet when he met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, just as the WikiLeaks Afghan war diary affair broke.

Mullen used the opportunity to denounce WikiLeaks. He tweeted from the aircraft: “Appalled by classified docs leak to WikliLeaks and decision to post. It changes nothing on Afghanistan strategy or our relationship w/Pakistan.”

It was, Lamb writes, Mullen’s 19th visit to Pakistan since 2007. The complexity of US-Pakistan relations goes back to the 1980s when the CIA provided billions of dollars of aid to the Afghan resistance movement fighting the Soviet army of occupation. These funds were channeled through the ISI, often to the anger of the mujaheddin fighters, many of whom who paid the ultimate price for the double-dealing ISI.

But the ISI’s activities were not confined to Afghanistan. They also targeted politicians, especially secular ones like former Prime Minister and opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. An official UN investigation into the Bhutto’s December 2007 assassination accuses the ISI of having an agent in the operating room where doctors tried to revive her. There is a body of evidence suggesting that the agency was responsible for terror bombings in Kabul and the Mumbai massacre during 2008.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the flood-stricken areas of Pakistan are dismayed by the lack of concern and help from their government. Reporters on the ground say that while the state has failed to act, Islamist organisations of all kinds, including Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is thought to be a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the 2008 assault on Mumbai, have stepped into the breach.
But while Washington’s support for Pakistan’s military - £11 billion since 2001 – continues to provide succour to the very forces that are killing US troops, the US and NATO cannot withdraw their support. They view the collapse of Pakistan as a worse option than an out-of-control Afghanistan. No wonder that Cameron and Zardari will be meeting behind closed doors!

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Afghan 'Crusaders' claim more lives

The election of Barack Obama has definitely made a difference to the lives of the people of Afghanistan – his administration will offer a public apology and an inquiry when dozens of civilians are indiscriminately killed by American warplanes. And that’s it.

Apart from sanctimonious words from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, there is no essential difference from the policies pursued by George W. Bush. The spurious “war on terror” continues, with over 60,000 foreign troops in occupation of Afghanistan. Obama is rushing another 30,000 American soldiers to the country shortly.

Rohul Amin, governor of Western Farah province where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed. Others said the death toll could be even higher. If confirmed, it could make the incident the single deadliest for Afghan civilians since the US invasion in 2001.

Jessica Barry, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, also sent a team which reached the scene of the air strikes yesterday. "There were women and there were children who were killed. It seemed they were trying to shelter in houses when they were hit," she said. The team saw houses destroyed and dozens of bodies. Barry said that among those killed was a first aid volunteer for Afghanistan's Red Crescent, who died along with 13 members of his family.

As for inquiries, they are ten a penny when it comes to atrocities like these, in Afghanistan, Iraq or even Occupied Palestine. The Israelis hold them into the brutal actions of their soldiers. The United Nations holds inquiries into Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and, of course, nothing happens, apart from the fact that the Israeli government rejects the findings out of hand. The killing goes on.

The Israelis will say that Palestinian civilians were used as human shields, as if this justified the use of banned phosphorous bombs and shooting civilians out of hand; the Americans will say that the Taleban were definitely in the vicinity when their brave pilots launched the air strikes. And the killing will go on.

And if civilians evade the bombs in Afghanistan, there is always a chance that latter-day Crusaders, aka the US army, will tell you that Islam is bad and that Christianity is good. Al Jazeera has broadcast a video showing US soldiers being instructed by the military’s top chaplain to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.

The footage was shot by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former fighter pilot. In his report for Al Jazeera, Hughes revealed that soldiers had imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, Afghan languages. After the Pentagon disputed his account, he retorted: “[U.S. soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons.” Hughes told Al Jazeera: “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

Today, Afghans staged an angry protest in the town of Farah, the provincial capital of the province where the bombing took place. They threw stones. Protesters were reportedly injured after shots were fired. The killing will go on.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

The Afghan debacle

Gordon Brown claims that recent fighting at Musa Qala is a turning point in the six-year war against the Taleban in Afghanistan. The truth is that British and NATO operations in the country have been an unmitigated debacle and a suicide mission for many of the troops involved.

Even Brown’s allies in the “war against terror” - the justification for invading Afghanistan in the first place - don’t necessarily share the prime minister’s confidence. The Bush adminstration and NATO have just launched three major reviews of the entire Afghan mission, ranging from security and counter-terrorism to political and economic development. The New York Times says that the reviews are an admission that earlier successes in fighting the Taleban and Al Qaeda forces may have evaporated.

This has been the most violent year since the invasion of 2001. One senior NATO diplomat has admitted that “now we have significant issues with certain areas producing opium and the Taleban coming back in certain parts of the country, as well”. In addition, the allies are less than complimentary about each other: “The Germans, the Spanish, the Italians don’t send any troops to the south except for 250 troops by Germany,” said Representative Joe Sestak. A retired three-star admiral, Sestak complained that some allies “refuse to do combat ops at night and some don’t fly when the first snowflake falls”.

The balance sheet is as follows:
- a six year-occupation by NATO forces
- 40,000 troops, plus 12,000 other US troops conducting “counter- terrorism” operations
- illegal imprisonment of innocent people at Guantanamo
- billions spent on military operations
- £18 billions spent on NGOs
- high altitude bombing which has killed countless villagers
- a suicide mission in Helmand – dubbed “Hell-land” by British troops – with £1bn being spent on a new base there
- a resurgent Taleban roaming freely through most parts of the country outside Kabul.

And what has all this meant for the people of Afghanistan? Here is what Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner, which opens as a film next week) found when he returned to his hometown Kabul for the first time in 30 years. The capital, home to some three million people, is nothing less than a disaster area. The poverty and disarray in many areas was, in Hosseini’s words, “unspeakable”.

While visiting the grave of a popular Afghan singer, he was “mobbed again by burqa-clad women and barefoot children, their hair matted with dirt, faces oozing with sores, their teeth rotting already, begging for baksheesh [alms].” A Kabul policeman complained to him about the millions in aid given to the NGOs who spent it on fancy cards, offices and guesthouses.

Whilst the NATO occupation of Afghanistan cannot be blamed entirely for the destruction of what was once a beautiful country and capital city – the Soviet invasion and the Taleban are also responsible - it is certain that six years of occupation and war by mainly US and British forces have taken the country further down the road to hell.

So what exactly is the purpose of this mission, if it cannot succeed? As British forces withdraw from Basra, openly admitting to television cameras, that to remain in Iraq would only unite people against them, Brown badly needs to point to success in Afghanistan as his grip on the economy is seen to falter. It is a heavy price to pay for enhancing the tarnished image of a British Prime Minister.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary