Author: Abid Ullah Jan
Publication: PakistanNews.com
Date: April 13, 1999
URL: http://paknews.com/articles/1999/apr/art1apr-13.html
(NOTE: This article was written
in 1999, before Nawaz Sharif's Govt was overthrown and may shed some
light on the US involvement in Pakistan's current Anti-India activities.)
The days of the balloon as an effective
delivery vehicle in CIA's propaganda operations have long since passed.
The propaganda game has now been evolved into a subtle contest of wits
and the agency's Covert Action staff has developed far more sophisticated
methods for spreading ideological messages through some selective journalists,
who feel proud to twist information on specific subjects for furthering
their careers and contributing to the propaganda objectives of the United
States government with a special slant.
This is not the first time that
The News ran a CIA propaganda piece. Such occasional contributions by the
sellouts are being made from time to time. The report that appeared under
the name of Kamran Khan in April 4, 1999 edition of The News is duplication
of a same piece that appeared in one of its October 1994 issues. Whether
or not "Nawaz Sharif was presented with a plan by the top military officials
to trade drugs on large scale to fund covert military operation," some
of our so-called reporters and analysts have no justification, whatsoever,
to take a few individual instances of drug trafficking by few opportunist
army or air force officers, put the blame squarely on shoulders of the
armed forces, and tell the public that Pakistan army from top to bottom
is following drug trafficking as a matter of official policy.
The recent attempt is in continuation
of the articles and some special reports that appeared after the Nawaz-Washington
Post 1994 controversy in a bid to establish the involvement of Pakistan
army in drug trafficking. Such cheap tactics have, however, added only
a false aura of respectability and authority to the information the CIA
is interested in seeing spread __ even if that information is perfectly
accurate because they are by definition restricted from presenting an objective
analysis of the subject of American "Drug War" and Pakistan's involvement
in drug trafficking.
If North Vietnamese astrologers
could be hired by the CIA to write false predictions about the coming disasters
which would befall certain Vietnam leaders and the success and unity which
awaited the South; if a number of papers, magazines and publishing houses,
ranging from East European emigre' organs to such reputable firms as Frederick
A Praeger of New York __ which admitted to having published many books
for the CIA could be hired, purchasing a few Pakistani journalists to write
from the US point of view and discredit Pakistan army is not a big deal.
The hoax of a "Drug War" gives the
US government not only an authority to be a self-appointed cop to intervene
in other sovereign states, but also keeps the police state in the US on
firm footing by incarcerating more than 440,000 prisoners in local jails,
840,000 in state, almost 120,000 in Federal prisons (along with 2.7 million
people on probation and more than 500,000 on parole) with more than half
of these on drug charges. Most absurd is the fact that in the name of "Drug
War", paramilitary can raid houses, detain citizen at gunpoint and forfeit
property worth millions of dollars to police department. In Pakistan we
have seen effectiveness of this weapon in recent events of taming the opposition
and chaining the press.
It is easy to write without any
confirmation and substantial evidence that PAF planes were used in drug
running operations, Pakistan Army traded heroin for guns, and ISI was deeply
involved in organising drug trade and purchasing arms for Sikh militants
etc; but, its certainly hard for such writers to mention exactly as to
who says so? Merely a repetition of "knowledgeable sources," and "they
say" is not good enough to substantiate the allegations that are so closely
and seriously linked to our national interest. It's not difficult to comprehend
who could be "they" when such writers conclude their writings with one
or two paragraphs from the CIA reports to give some authenticity to their
propaganda.
It has been confirmed that there
were no heroin factories in Pakistan before 1979 and "in 1980," says Harold
D Wankel, DEA Assistant Administrator of Operations, "there were no heroin
addicts in Pakistan." Who brought this manufacturing spillover, which made
more than one million addicts in a country with about half the population
of United States? Of course, no one but the CIA.
The CIA-drug relation started way
back in late 1960s, when we had not even heard of cocaine and heroin, let
alone dealing them for guns by our army. According to Victor Marchetti,
a veteran of 14 years with the CIA __ where he rose to be executive assistant
to the Deputy Director of CIA __ in 1967, "one officer was assigned to
travel all over Latin America, buying all sorts of hallucinatory drugs
which might have some application to intelligence activities and operations."
That was the point when CIA first got involved with the drugs, and thought
of using it for running its operations.
John D Marks, who worked as an analyst
and US State Department Intelligence Expert for many years, wrote how the
CIA was involved in narcotics traffic for its benefit as early as the Vietnam
War. In Vietnam he wrote, "the CIA hoped to defeat the Pathet Lao and North
Vietnamese; for that purpose, it was willing to supply guns, money and
training to the Meo tribe... The CIA was willing to overlook the fact that
the Meo's primary cash crop was opium and that they continued to sell the
drugs during their 'secret' war," for the US against communists.
When planes of the CIA proprietary
airline, Air America could be used to carry opium for Meos and the US highest
military officers supported by the Agency could be the kingpins of the
drugs trade __ as explained in "CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," how
can we believe that the CIA didn't suggest to cook opium, make heroin,
sell it in their US market and buy guns for the Afghan Mujahideen to fight
and turn Afghanistan into a Soviet Vietnam.
It is the CIA, not our armed forces,
that is trafficking dope and its clandestine personnel are using this trade,
as they have used almost every other criminal activity known to man, as
a matter of official policy. In 1986, soon after dictator Jean-Claude was
overthrown, the CIA created a unit (SIN) within Haitian army for fighting
cocaine trade __ like the ANF in Pakistan. As usual, the SIN quickly became
the biggest drug-dealing operations under the auspices of the CIA in the
Caribbean region. This is not the case with our armed forces but our agencies
created for fighting drug trafficking have certainly been corrupted and
used by the government and the US to an unimaginable extent.
It needs a Herculean effort to expose
the fact that the amount of drugs smuggled to the US by the private traffickers
is at the most one tenth of the total drugs trafficked by the agents __
like Ayyaz Baluch __ of CIA, DEA, ANF and other agencies in Pakistan and
other countries. According to San Diego Union-Tribune, August 13, 1996,
Celerino Castelo __ a former DEA agent __ stated that together with 3 other
ex-DEA agents, they were willing to testify in Congress regarding their
direct knowledge of CIA involvement in international drug trafficking.
Castillo estimates that approximately 75% of narcotics entered the US with
the acquiescence or direct participation of US and foreign CIA agents.
Since 1960s, the CIA funded most
of its covert operations __ like the one for shutting down BCCI __ with
drug money, earned by organised selling of drugs in American streets, to
its own people for money. So, the "Drug War" is in fact a war for money
and market. It is a war for more dominance, not a war on drugs by any means.
Maligning our armed forces is part of a bigger plot for more interference
in our internal set-up and affairs on the one hand and making the army
subservient to the civilian government of the American choice on the other.
Writers like Kamran Khan worry too
much about our prime minister's knowledge of our armed forces dealing in
drugs but they take no pain to inform the public about the US politicians
and their agencies' involvement with drug trade. In the second week of
October 1994, at a press conference even Bill Clinton momentarily took
on a ghastly pallor when queried by the stalwart of Washington press corps,
Sara McClendon. She claimed that the Bush administration and the CIA established
an operation in the early '80s to ship drugs into the US. She wanted to
know what Clinton knew about CIA's arms-drug shipments through Mena airport
in South Arkansas __ Clinton's home state.
Clinton said he knew nothing. Since
it was a federal matter, "the state really had next to nothing to do with
it" said Clinton. "Everybody who's ever looked into it knows it."
Just two days later, Evans Pritchard,
Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph London wrote that Clinton,
like his predecessors, knew a good deal more about drug-arms shipments
in Mena and the CIA's involvement. He wrote in October 9 issue of Sunday
Telegraph that by that time Arkansas "was close to becoming a narco-republic
__ a sort of mini-Colombia, within the borders of the United States." He
further wrote that at that time in Arkansas parties were given "at which
cocaine would be served like hors-d'oeuvres and sex was rampant." He claimed
that some of these revels are documented in police records, and that "Bill
Clinton was in frequent attendance."
It clearly shows that the "Drug
War" is not an effort to stop the unstoppable, but to dominate the market
forces, its profits and to have a good cover for intervention in other
countries' internal affairs in the name of war on drugs. In October 1996,
Jack Blum (former special counsel to the 1987 "Kerry" Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations) testified
before the October 1996 Senate Select Intelligence Committee on alleged
CIA drug trafficking in the 1980s, chaired by Senator Arlen Specter. In
his testimony, Blum said:
"For criminal organisations, participating
in covert operations offers much more than money. They may get a voice
in selecting the new government. They may get a government that owes them
for help in coming to power. They may be able to use their connections
with the United States government to enhance their political power at home..."
Blum has said something quite significant
here. The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted
by narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging
narco-traffickers and corrupted politicians. It's fascinating that Blum's
description wouldn't be out of place in describing the Opium Wars of the
19th century. From what Blum describes, it seems that narco- colonialism
is alive and well and residing centrally at CIA headquarters at Langley,
Virginia.
It has been observed that the agencies
that get involved with the CIA or the DEA get corrupted while cooperating
to, what they call, "stop drug trafficking." Unlike Pakistan, drug war
aid in Colombia, for example, is going directly to the military, which
is really neck deep in drug trafficking. The military uses drug aid for
its own purposes ranging from running death squads, managing atrocities,
killing peasant leaders, to massacring political leadership. When the US
wants to move in, it will have a cover to do it, and it has done it already
at the time of killing Escobar.
CIA's role in the game is to make
partners for dealing drugs and profiting together for some time and then
to discredit and discard them once the purpose is served. Haiti is the
recent example where CIA was in deep connection with the paramilitary group
FRAPH and Warren Christopher confirmed that Emanual Constant, head of FRAPH,
and Michael Francois, the Haitian police chief were on ClA's pay-roll.
Drugs, undoubtedly, was the common ground of understanding between them.
But the same is not true for Pakistan
army. Unlike the CIA, the Pakistan army has never trafficked in dope as
a matter of official policy. If some of our officers were involved in narcotics
traffic for their own gains, we cannot attribute their deeds to the whole
defence forces of Pakistan and say that the allegations that "a blue print
for drug trafficking was drawn by the army does have a ring of truth to
it." This is a ridiculous attempt to discredit our army.
The pointlessness of the "drug war"
has now been confirmed, but the US administration is still adamant on utilising
it in different productive ways. The recent attempt at maligning our armed
forces is simply directed to make the institution submissive to the government
for achieving other Washington-directed objectives. In the wake of such
disinformation campaigns by the US against our armed forces and our government
against its critics and political opponents, we have to be in a state of
continued alertness. We do not have to just glance at a story in the papers
and believe it, or just skip rapidly over the unfamiliar rubble of falsification.
We have to excavate the truth, analyse and a compare and dissect the facts
as the "Drug War" propaganda and the alleged involvement of the army or
some figures from politics and press in drug running is not the last, but
the least, we are facing as a prelude to the neo-narco-colonialism of the
new world order.
