Freedom Fighter

The World Trade Center bombing is the legacy of the CIA's disastrous policy of arming the mujahedeen in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not only have Afghan war veterans been implicated in the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history, but mujahedeen warlords also have become the world's biggest heroin producers, according to experts in the international drug trade.

The CIA's arms shipments and training program for the mujahedeen became one its most massive covert operations, costing at least $2 billion, far surpassing U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras. If anything, the battle Afghanistan motivated the CIA more than the war against the Sandinistas. In Nicaragua, the CIA fought Soviet proxies. In Afghanistan, the enemy was the Soviet army, which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.

Support for Nicaraguan and Afghani "freedom fighters" became the cornerstone of the so-called Reagan Doctrine-an attempt not just to contain Communism but to roll it back. While the contras were mostly a collection of former dictator Anastasio Somoza's street thugs, in Afghanistan the rebels were Islamic extremists and narco-terrorists who hated America as much as they despised the Godless Russians.

Billions of dollars of CIA money, matched by billions from Saudi Arabia (a quid pro quo for receiving AWAC surveillance planes over the adamant protests of the pro-Israel lobby), were passed through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to the Afghan rebels. The bank was also used to channel funds to the contras. But no matter how much money the Afghan rebels received it never seemed to be enough. In order to augment their funds, rebel chieftains began to grow poppies, refine opium into heroin, and sell the drug in the U.S. and Europe. In 1979, Pakistan and Afghanistanexported virtually no heroin to the West. By 1981, the drug lords, many high-ranking members of Pakistan's political and military establishment, controlled 60 per cent of America's heroin market. "Trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin-protected by ISI [Pakistan's internal security service] papers from police search," wrote Alfred McCoy in The Politics of Heroin (Lawrence Hill, 1991).

Ruined citrus crops, a plague of heroin, and hundreds of thousands of casualties didn't deter the CIA from its holy war against communism in Afghanistan. "On the afternoon of February 15, 1989, the champagne began flowing at CIA headquarters," wrote Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Tim
Weiner in Blank Check, a book about covert operations. "A rare exultation filled the air. After fifteen years of failure and humiliation, the Agency had won a famous victory. The last Soviet troops had left Afghanistan. The Agency's biggest covert action since the height of the Vietnam war had achieved its goal. The CIA had won its jihad."

Reproduced from _The Village Voice_, 4/15/93
THE CIA AND HEROIN FINANCED THE MUJAHEDEEN
By Robert I. Friedman