excerpts from the book

Drugs, Oil, and War

The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

by Peter Dale Scott

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003, paperback

pxi
Drug networks are important factors in the politics of every continent. The United States returns repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies - drug proxies - with which it has a penchant to become involved.

pxi
In Colombia, we are nominally fighting a war on drugs; yet the chief drug-trafficking faction, the paramilitaries, are allies of our allies, the Colombian army.

pxii
The drug-trafficking network of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a former CIA ally ... was defeated with the help of another drug proxy, the Afghan Northern Alliance. In the pursuit of bin Laden, the United States defeated his allies, the Taliban (which in 2000 had enforced a total ban on opium cultivation its area), with the aid of the Northern Alliance (which in the same period had overseen a trebling of opium cultivation in its area).

pxii
The great resistance that still exists to acknowledging past U.S. involvement in and responsibility for covert intrigues contributes to our present inability to bring true peace and security to the rest of the world. The agencies responsible for past errors are too concerned to preserve not only their reputations but their alliances and, above all, the corrupt social systems in which such alliances have thrived. Consequently an international drug traffic, which the United States helped enlarge, continues to thrive.

pxiii
Right after World War II, building on the so-called Quincy Agreements with Saudi Arabia in 1945, the United States moved to dominate a global system for the production and distribution of oil. Starting with the Truman Doctrine in 1946, U.S. geostrategic thinking was oil based. What began as a strategy for containment of the Soviet Union has become more and more nakedly a determination to control the oil resources of the world. This pursuit has progressively deformed the domestic U.S. economy, rendering it more and more unbalanced and dependent on heavy military expenditures in remote and ungovernable areas-most recently Afghanistan. It has also made the United States an increasingly belligerent power, fighting wars, especially in Asia, where it turns time after time to allies and assets prominent in the global drug traffic.

pxiii
Right after World War II, building on the so-called Quincy Agreements with Saudi Arabia in 1945, the United States moved to dominate a global system for the production and distribution of oil. Starting with the Truman Doctrine in 1946, U.S. geostrategic thinking was oil based. What began as a strategy for containment of the Soviet Union has become more and more nakedly a determination to control the oil resources of the world.

pxiv
From Iran in 1953 to Indonesia in 1965 and Ghana in 1966 the CIA was involved in the covert overthrow of governments around the world that had threatened to nationalize their oil industries

pxiv
Frank Viviano observed in the San Francisco Chronicle (September 26, 2001)

The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word: oil. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a map of the world's principal energy sources in the 21st century. The defense of these energy resources - rather than a simple confrontation between Islam and the West - will be the primary flash point of global conflict for decades to come.

pxv
The United States balances its payments by secret agreements with Saudi Arabia to recycle petrodollars to the United States and to ensure that OPEC sales all over the world are denominated in U.S. dollars. These arrangements to ease pressure on the U.S. currency have helped, as an inevitable consequence, to create debt crises all over the Third World.

p1
"Deep politics' or deep political processes [are] a series of practices, at odds with the laws and mores of society.

p8
The reasons why the United States has engaged in wars against the Third World have been articulated in terms of high-minded strategy. But before the high-minded papers appear, the energies for involvement have been generated by the interests, and with them the campaign contributions, of private sectors frequently financed by oil, by drugs, or both.

p27
In the half century since the Korean War the United States has been involved in four major wars in the Third World: in Vietnam (1961-1975), in the Persian Gulf (1990-1991), in Colombia (1991-present), and in Afghanistan (2001-2002).' All four wars were fought in or near significant oil-producing areas. All four involved reliance on proxies who were also major international drug traffickers. The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II.

p27
The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II.

p27
All empires since the Renaissance have been driven by the search for foreign resources, and nearly all-including the British, the French, and the Dutch-used ( drugs as a cheap way to pay for overseas expansion. When the United States 7 decided to preserve Western influence in Southeast Asia, it inherited a social structure of former colonial regimes that had coexisted in one way or other with powerful Chinese Triads engaged in the drug traffic .

p28
The United States has become more and more committed to exclusive domination of the world oil economy, both to secure its increasing oil needs and to preclude this power from passing into the hands of anyone else. The consistent U.S. recourse to actions that have built up the global drug traffic raises an analogous question: Did the United States seek to maintain control over the global drug economy to ensure that its riches would strengthen the U.S. economy and to deny them to communist enemies?

p28
Over the long haul, since World War II, oil interests have dictated the general disposition of U.S. foreign policy.

p29
In 1998 the United States intervened in Kosovo, on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which earlier the U.S. State Department had described as a drug-financed terrorist force. This followed talk of the Balkans as a route for a Western pipeline to transport oil from the newly exploited oil fields of Central Asia.

p33
The U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 was accompanied by restoration of opium for the world market, a recreation of what happened with the earlier U.S. intervention of 1979-1980, and before that with the U.S. intervention in Indochina after 1959, and in Southeast Asia in 1950.

p39
In Colombia, we are fighting a war (supposedly on drugs but in fact financed in part by drugs) with a drug proxy - the corrupt Colombian army and its even more corrupt paramilitary auxiliaries. In 2001 Colombian government sources estimated that 40 percent of Colombian cocaine exports were controlled by rightwing paramilitary warlords and their trafficking allies. Meanwhile the amount controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the target of the U.S. "war on drugs," was estimated by the Colombian government to be 2.5 percent.

p39
The origins of the current U.S. presence in Colombia can be traced back to 1984, one year after the discovery by Occidental Oil of the billion-barrel Cano Limon oilfield in 1983.

p40
Oil, especially the offshore oil deposits of the South China Sea, helps explain he general U.S. interest in Southeast Asia.

p40
In the case of Australia, he first major drug imports were financed by the Nugan Hand Bank, organized in part by veterans of U.S. Special Forces and CIA in Laos. The bank combined drug financing with arms deals and support for CIA covert operations in other regions such as Africa.

p41
The U.S. military intervention in Colombia has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in coca production (from 3.8 to 12.3 thousand hectares between 1991 and 1999).'

p41
The strengthening of the global narcotics traffic has fueled other smuggling and related criminal activities, leading to the consolidation of an international criminal milieu. Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, Russian gangs, and the Mafias of Italy, America, and Colombia have now combined into a "worldwide criminal consortium.

p41
The United States handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s by arranging, by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The first of these deals assured a special and ongoing Saudi stake in the health of the U.S. dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars. These two deals assured that the U.S. economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes. The heaviest burdens would be borne instead by the economies of less developed countries.

From these developments emerged the twin phenomena underlying 9/11 triumphalist U.S. unilateralism on the one hand and global Third World indebtedness on the other.

p42
George Bush [Senior] moved swiftly in 1990 to counter the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to U.S.-Saudi security in the Persian Gulf. The threat was not just that the United States itself would lose oil from the Gulf... A bigger threat was that Saddam would become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, directly controlling 20 percent of OPEC production and 25 percent of world oil reserves.

p42
The failure of the U.S. government to investigate and prosecute BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] reflected not only the extent of BCCI penetration of U.S. ruling circles but also U.S. economic dependence on the continued influx of petrodollars and narco-dollars.

p42
The U.S.-Saudi [oil] deals increased U.S. dependence on oil- and drug-funded Arab assets such as BCCI - the Bank of Credit and Commerce International - which in the 1980s became a chief paymaster for the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedin and even ran arms directly to them from Karachi. The failure of the U.S. government to investigate and prosecute BCCI reflected not only the extent of BCCI penetration of U.S. ruling circles but also U.S. economic dependence on the continued influx of petrodollars and narco-dollars.

As a former NSC economist commented, "[Treasury Secretary James] Baker didn't pursue BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] because he thought a prosecution of the bank would damage the United States' reputation as a safe haven for flight capital and overseas investments.

p43
The victorious armies of Mao Tse-tung began to eliminate Chinese opium, the source of 85 percent of the world's heroin.

p43
In the 1950s opium from Indochina traveled through Iran and Lebanon to the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles and the Sicilian Mafia under Lucky Luciano. In the 1980s mujahedin heroin was reaching the Sicilian Mafia via the Turkish Gray Wolves, who "worked in tandem with the Turkish Army's Counter-Guerrilla Organization, which functioned as the Turkish branch of the CIA's multinational 'stay behind' program. "30 The routes shifted with the politics of the times, but the CIA denominator remained constant.

The following sections examine moments in which U.S. wars were deeply intertwined with the world drug traffic, beginning with the most recent.

p42
In October 2001 a UN report confirmed that the Taliban had successfully eliminated the year's opium production in Afghanistan, which in recent years had supplied 90 percent of Europe's heroin. However, it appears that what would have been the world's largest curtailment of opium production in half a century has now been reversed. Following the defeat of the Taliban, farmers began replanting wheat fields with opium poppy., and it is now estimated that in 2002 opium harvest is about 3,700 tons ... or more than the 2000 harvest.

p64
U.S. oil reserves have declined to 2.8 percent of the world total whereas the Gulf states now have 66.5 percent. Meanwhile U.S. oil dependency continues to increase: in 1990, the United States imported 42 percent of its total oil requirements; ten years later this had risen to 60 percent.

p65
scholar Alain Labrousse, formerly editor of the respected Geopolitical Drug Dispatch, has estimated that 80 percent of the profits from drug trafficking ends up in the banks of the wealthy countries or their branches in the underdeveloped countries where there is weaker legal control.

p73
As developed under Clinton, the U.S. Plan Colombia was, like so many so-called U.S. aid programs in the past, 90 percent military... Without any coherent objective for Colombia, it is a godsend for the usual suppliers of munitions, herbicides, and helicopters.

p75
In the U.S. press, one does not often see the official Colombian estimates as to the percentage of the drug trade controlled by the paramilitaries, as compared to FARC. According to Colombian government estimates in 2001, as reported by Newsweek and the San Francisco Chronicle respectively, these figures were 40 percent for the paramilitaries, 2.5 percent for FARC. Nevertheless Plan Colombia' s eradication program is focused primarily on the Amazon region controlled by FARC.

p76
Colombia had a violent history long before U.S. intervention. This violence reflects an almost feudal social structure, in which a wealthy overclass has long used brutal tactics to displace peasants and oppress plantation workers. But America's arrival in 1962 with counterinsurgency techniques made matters worse: it forced small bands of revolutionaries to coalesce into an organized national movement.

p77
Trained terrorist counterrevolutionaries ... assets of the Colombian state security apparatus... were employed by U.S. corporations anxious to protect their workforces from unionization, as well as in antiunion campaigns by Colombian suppliers to large U.S. corporations. Oil companies in particular have been part of the state-coordinated campaign against left-wing guerrillas.

p77
1981 was the year in which the major drug traffickers, collaborating with the Colombian army, established a training school for a nationwide counterterrorist network [MAS]... The traffickers put up the money and the generals contracted for Israeli and British mercenaries to come to Colombia to run the death squad school.

MAS played an overtly political role as a criminal extension of the army. Most notably it enabled the army to frustrate the peace agreement negotiated with FARC by President Betancur in the 1980s, by murdering over seven hundred FARC members who entered the constitutional apolitical process as members of a political party, the Union Patriótica.

p78
The intent of U.S.-backed strategies [in Colombia] as been to drive FARC out of the oil-bearing northern and central Colombia into the Amazon region southeast of the cordillera, in a remote zone that since 1998 has been virtually conceded to it by the central government. There the former guerrilla force is now in effect a governing one, administering and taxing the regions it controls.

Incredibly, the result of another U.S. policy, drug eradication, has been to turn this region into a major coca-producing area.

... Coca production is now concentrated in an area under the ongoing control of a revolutionary force, in a region where the central government cannot normally operate.

Thus the end result of considerable U.S. effort has been to create a U.S. nightmare: the narco-guerrilla.

p89
The CIA can (and does) point to its role in the arrest or elimination of a number of major Colombian traffickers. These arrests have not diminished the actual flow of cocaine into the United States, which on the contrary reached a new high in 2000. But they have institutionalized the relationship of law enforcement to rival cartels and visibly contributed to the increase of urban cartel violence.

The true purpose of most of these campaigns, like the current Plan Colombia, has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA .

p98
Ambassador Robert White, who was our ambassador in Colombia under Jimmy Carter

Tell me where you put your money, and I'll tell you what your foreign policy is. If you put over 90 cents of your foreign policy dollar into the Pentagon and the CIA, hen your policy is going to emphasize a military approach, a secretive, under the table approach, to the problems. For example, the budget for the White House Drug office, this office of Narcotics Control, is greater than the State Department and the Commerce Department put together. Now what possible sense can that make? You are starving diplomacy, you are exalting a military approach to problems. And frankly, all the experience we've had is that these anti- or counter-narcotics programs do not work. During the lifetime of the program in Colombia, the last three years, this intensive counter-narcotics program, exports to the United States have more than doubled.

p98
Ambassador Robert White, who was our ambassador in Colombia under Jimmy Carter

Tell me where you put your money, and I'll tell you what your foreign policy is. If you put over 90 cents of your foreign policy dollar into the Pentagon and the CIA, hen your policy is going to emphasize a military approach, a secretive, under the table approach.

p99
Plan Colombia's proponents originally projected a "successful" campaign on the model of El Salvador - a dirty war in which Washington delegated the killing of insurgents to U.S.-trained local forces. Today more and more observers are seeing analogies with America's failed adventure in Vietnam. The tactics are eerily similar: from military advisers, high-tech listening posts, defoliation programs, river boats, and helicopters, to assaults on the countryside that displace hundreds of thousands of civilians.

p99
The helicopter and herbicide industries, the oil companies, and the Pentagon [seek] new bases in [Colombia]. One hears the same geopolitical rhetoric about sea lanes and natural resources. Professional think tanks, such as RAND and FPRI, are reinforcing the madness in Washington, with their proposals on how to make an ill-starred policy even worse. And there is the same ominous background of deep-rooted links to local drug kingpins - as in Afghanistan, Peru, Haiti, Honduras, and Kosovo.

p99
Demands from major U.S. oil corporations for increased security [in Colombia] have led the U.S. government into a de facto alliance with local right-wing forces involved in drug trafficking.

p100
The ultimate concern of some [in the U.S. and Colombia] is to protect what is on the ground for as long as possible, even if there is no hope of winning.

p100
Large-scale dysfunctional policies, like the so-called war on drugs, are not amenable to rational criticism. They tend instead to metastasize from a policy into a bureaucratic habit: a habit in which failure, predictably, becomes a case for escalation.

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