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November 9, 2003
REVIEWS: Awash with heroin
It is, admittedly, difficult to conceive of it more than a quarter-century later, but let’s suppose for a moment that the democratic experiment tentatively embarked upon in the dying days of 1971 hadn’t been rudely interrupted five-and-a-half years later. Within that imagined context, it is reasonably safe to assume that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would still have been in power when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan in 1979.
It is hard to say how he would have reacted; it would have depended to a considerable extent on the degree to which he felt threatened by the communist takeover in Kabul and the subsequent Soviet occupation. Perhaps Moscow’s action would have driven Bhutto closer still to his friends in the Middle East. Chances are that he also would have been open to the idea of dealings with, even surreptitious support for, sections of the Afghan resistance. It is extremely unlikely, though, that he would have allowed Pakistan to be converted effectively into a base for the CIA’s largest covert operation since the Vietnam war.
There would, inevitably, have been refugees. But any responsible government would have prevented the proliferation of training camps and opium-refining laboratories along the extensive Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“Responsible” isn’t, of course, a word that comes readily to mind when contemplating the Bhutto administration. But compared to the successor regime, it was almost the epitome of good governance. One of the historical images hard to banish from the mind is that of General Ziaul Haq, with Bhutto’s blood still fresh on his hands, virtually begging Zbigniew Brzezinski (that era’s equivalent of Condoleezza Rice, and the Carter administration’s most aggressive reactionary) to step in and prevent the Russians from crossing the Khyber Pass.
Zia may have been unaware that Brzezinski was already deeply involved in the Afghan imbroglio — in recent years he has been proudly claiming credit for luring the Red Army into Afghanistan in the first place. Anyhow, the relationship was consummated and Islamabad’s ties with Washington grew even stronger after Ronald Reagan entered the White House. Meanwhile, whereas the PDPA regime in Kabul had discouraged poppy cultivation, the crop thrived in areas of Afghanistan “liberated” by the Mujahideen — often with the aid of Israeli weapons, paid for by the Saudis and routed through Pakistan, all at the behest of the US.
As Dr Ikramul Haq elaborates in his well-researched and profoundly disturbing book, before long Pakistan was awash with heroin as well as all manner of weapons. Addiction grew exponentially, as did violence. At the same time, enormous fortunes were made — not least by certain members of the military hierarchy. The US turned a blind eye to the heroin trade, even though large quantities of the drug were reaching the streets of New York and other Western cities — because, the author suggests, action to curtail it would have undermined the Zia regime.
It is his contention that in its interventions worldwide, the US has invariably been willing to use drugs as both a destabilizing influence and a source of lucre. He broadens his case and makes it more compelling by collating evidence of such behaviour over the decades in regions extending from Indochina to Central America (including a fascinating section on the BCCI’s murky role as a leading launderer of tainted cash). And there can be little question that crucial sections of the policy-making establishment in Washington considered communism a far greater threat than drug-dealing.
Actually, this attitude makes perfect sense if you are bent upon advancing the capitalist cause; after all, the drug trade is clearly an expression of free enterprise.
By the time the Zia era came to an abrupt end (not a moment too soon, one might add), the ruling elite were well and truly addicted; the politicians who followed, claims the author, were by no means averse to profiting — at least indirectly — from drug money, and measures against leading practitioners of this lethal trade were only half-hearted. His contention that radical Islamists defend heroin exports as an acceptable means of poisoning Western “infidels” conjures up a mirror image of the CIA’s approach to cocaine and communism. It’s an open question, however, whether drugs are a considered component of Washington’s hegemonistic strategy or merely a cynical shortcut to imperial objectives.
Dr Ikram is on surer ground when, in the second section of the book, he portrays the nation’s deepening debt and the plethora of IMF prescriptions as a recipe for subjugation. He dwells at length on Pakistan’s inequitable tax structure and points out how the rules laid down by international financial institutions, far from offering a panacea, tend to exacerbate the common man’s plight. Pleading for new loans in order to pay off the interest on previous ones is an old Pakistani habit, and the author points out that the present regime’s claims of spearheading a recovery are laughable — although the situation would have been considerably more dire but for General Musharraf’s decision to fulfil more or less every American wish in the wake of 9/11.
As with his previous From Hash to Heroin, Dr Ikramul Haq has come up with an information-packed (and meticulously footnoted) volume that can prove particularly useful to students of politics, economics and international affairs, but also has much to offer general readers interested in understanding how Pakistan positioned itself near the precipice. The book would have benefited from more rigorous editing to weed out the occasional repetition and iron out some of the idiomatic infelicities. But that’s only a minor drawback when measured against its potential as a wake-up call.
Pakistan: Drug Trap to Debt Trap
By Dr Ikramul Haq
Lahore Law Publications, #34 (2nd floor), SadiqPlaza, 69 Shahra-I-Quaid-I-Azam,
Lahore-54000. Tel: 042-6365582
Email: sales@paktax.com.pk
ISBN 969-8403-19-1. 303pp. Rs300
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