The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Special Conference on Afghanistan

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Special Conference on Afghanistan, held in Moscow on 27 March, marks a new stage in the international community’s relations with this beleaguered country. It reflected the growing clout of Russia and China, the founders of the SCO, which includes Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and four observers — India, Iran, Pakistan and Mongolia.
In attendance for the first time were top US and NATO officials, including US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon and NATO Deputy Secretary General Martin Howard, as well as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Secretary General of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Mark Perrin de Brichambaut. Among the 36 countries participating were representatives from the G8, the European Union and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. The unanimously adopted Joint Action Plan underlined the SCO’s importance “for practical interaction between Afghanistan and its neighbouring states in combating terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime.”
The Moscow Declaration upstaged the UN Conference on Afghanistan held four days later, coming down hard on Pakistan with a call for more effective means to combat terrorism, including denying sanctuaries to the resistance. Coming just over a month after Kyrgyzstan announced the closing of the US airbase on its territory, the conference reiterated the SCO’s position that it is opposed to the expansion of US military interests in Central Asia, but is willing to expand cooperation with the US and NATO in Afghanistan, short of sending troops. Interestingly, Obama announced a shift in US policy emphasis on the same day as the SCO summit, promising greater consultation with Afghanistan ’s neighbours.
It also declared support for the efforts of the Karzai government, which is openly criticised as weak and corrupt by US officials. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin warned against creating a power vacuum in Afghanistan in the run-up to the presidential elections later this year. Russia also came out against negotiating with the Taliban.
The Russians believe that Afghan drug trafficking is the most serious threat to the security of Russia and Central Asia. Russia’s anti-drug chief Viktor Ivanov last week called the coalition’s anti-drug policy a fiasco, nothing that opium production in Afghanistan had soared since the deployment of US and NATO troops in the country. Afghan narcotics, he said, kill 30,000 people in Russia every year, twice as many as the Soviet Union lost during its decade-long military intervention in Afghanistan. The Action Plan calls for joint SCO-Afghan operations in combating drug trafficking and organised crime, including training of drug agencies, combating laundering of drug money and improving border controls.
The Plan reads like a roadmap for bringing Afghanistan into the SCO fold, a move which India’s envoy approved of. The idea of Afghanistan joining the SCO would clearly be anathema to the US, however, and Obama’s proposal to create a NATO-dominated Contact Group with Afghanistan is clearly a way to contain the growing influence of the SCO. But with NATO allies reluctant to back Obama’s surge strategy, major concessions will have to be made, affecting virtually all US foreign policy.
Russia has approved rail transit of non-military supplies to Afghanistan, and suggested this could include military cargo as well, though such approval is surely conditional on US actions affecting Russia, primarily its plans for missile bases in Eastern Europe and its campaign against Iran. Russian analyst Alexander Lukin says cooperation with the SCO offers the US and NATO an acceptable format to bring Iran into the dialogue. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Akhundzadeh sat across the table from the US envoy at the Moscow Conference.
Iran is a dilemma for the SCO. Just as Georgia is being put on hold in NATO, Iran’s application to join the SCO was put off again. “The admission of new members to the SCO should strengthen the organisation, but not cause new problems,” SCO Secretary General Bolat Nurgaliyev said last month. Full membership would provide Tehran with a mutual assistance guarantee similar to that provided NATO members. Just as NATO’s expansion plans brought the world perilously close to war last summer over Georgia, so would a US-Israeli attack on Iran if it were a full member. This will be addressed at the next SCO summit which will be held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in June.
In 2003, Iran indicated to the Bush administration that it was no friend of the Taliban and was willing to cooperate in stabilising the situation in Afghanistan, but its overtures were spurned and the invasion of Iraq put paid to any such plans. The hysterical campaign against Iran since has only made the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan harder — there are reports that Iran may even be burying the hatchet with the Taliban. But its enthusiasm for the SCO and continued support from China and Russia in its stand-off with the West make this possibility unlikely.
Iran is also suffering from the exploding drug trafficking from Afghanistan that the US invasion facilitated, plus a surge of Afghan refugees. Russia in no doubt delighted with the Iranian police chief Esmaeel Ahmadi-Moghadam’s announcement last week that Iran was ready to train Afghan police. The Germans have botched this and the Iranians could hardly do worse. If the US were serious about containing the huge heroin problem it created, it would take their offer seriously.
But Obama will be unlikely to capture this moment, given his timidity so far in dealing with the mess he was bequeathed. He needs to build a new coalition and endgame strategy that would avoid the humiliation the US suffered in Vietnam, and fast. There are many adjustments to be made — nixing the Bush-Brzezinski strategy of surrounding Russia with NATO members for starters. And winding down the campaign against Iran, which will include reining in Israel. US policymakers who want to reverse the reckless sabre-rattling of the Bush years can actually take solace in the rise of the SCO, which was founded in 2001 and whose growing prominence is a direct result of the Bush years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO’s self-proclaimed status as world policeman in the past two decades, Russia and China were more or less forced to form their own “NATO”. After all, nature abhors a vacuum.
Ironically, as the attempt to surround Russia sputters, it is Afghanistan that is now surrounded by SCO members and observers, notably Iran, anxious to contain drug trafficking. In this context, US-Israel threats to attack Iran are more and more like the boy who cried “Wolf!” The Bush Afghanistan/Iran policies in shambles and there is little indication so far that much is being done to improve the situation.
Can NATO and the SCO become allies in Afghanistan, or are they fated to be enemies? Council for Foreign Relations analyst Evan Feigenbaum, until recently the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, says the SCO conference “offers an opportunity for the US to try to turn what are ostensibly common interests into complementary polices,” but he’s not optimistic. He pointed to the SCO call in 2005 for a timeline for a US withdrawal from military bases in Central Asia, which “attracted a lot of notoriety,” and asks just what the SCO could actually do in Afghanistan. Good question. How can Chinese and Russian support save the totally discredited Karzai regime? How would their “help” be greeted by Afghans? Clearly some accommodation with, if not total surrender to the Taliban is the deadend the US has reached, and SCO involvement can change this.
Feigenbaum makes another telling observation: “We really don’t understand what the SCO is ... Is it a security group? Is it a trade bloc? Is it a group of non-democratic countries that have created a kind of safe zone where the US and Europeans don’t talk to them about human rights and democracy?” Indeed, there is little uniting the suspicious and uneasy SCO members other than fear and perhaps loathing of the US and Taliban, and a desire to staunch the drug smuggling which the US is failing so spectacularly to deal with. If NATO were to disband or at least retract its claws, the SCO might well collapse. Expanding it to include, say, Iran, let alone Pakistan and India, would paralyse it.
The most likely cooperation would be in containing the drug flow, if the US is indeed serious about this and not part of the problem, as some analysts — in the first place Russian — contend. The prospects of establishing a stable, popular political regime opposed to the Taliban is a fantasy apparently shared by both NATO and the SCO. But Russia and China are hardly going to have more success in destroying the Taliban than the US. Any attempt by either Russia or China to contribute to the slaughter now taking place will only backfire among their own restive Muslim minorities, which all SCO members have.
It appears that Russia genuinely wants the US to succeed in bringing Afghanistan to heel. Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin said recently, “We want to prevent the virus of extremism from crossing the borders of Afghanistan and take over other states in the region such as Pakistan. If NATO failed, it would be Russia and her partners that would have to fight against the extremists in Afghanistan.” Rogozin proposes using the NATO-Russia Council to establish a security order stretching “from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Perhaps NATO could develop into PATO, a Pacific-Atlantic alliance.”
Whether this is merely Rogozin being flippant is not clear. Surely such an organisation belongs as part of the UN, which is perhaps what he meant. In any case, Rogozin is back on the warpath, or rather the peacepath, calling NATO’s month-long war games in Georgia scheduled for 7 May a “provocation” and calling for them to be cancelled. If they go ahead, Russia will “take appropriate measures”, one of which already has been taken with the cancellation of a meeting of Russian and NATO general staff commanders this week. There are lots more aces up the Russian sleeve, including SCO and Afghan ones. If Obama persists in Bush-era belligerence, it will only make resolving the many problems he faces all the more difficult.
Even if he can keep the SCO onside, it is no lifejacket for NATO in Afghanistan. The best the two “security” organisations can do is to let it go its own way, “containing” it until it recovers from the trauma of all the “help” it has been force-fed over the past three decades.
***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13291

Crime and Prohibition

Governments will need new revenues and to lower current expenses. Charles Hugh Smith over at two minds makes the case well.

"By a wide margin, no policy has failed more spectacularly and at greater cost in human lives and national treasure than the "war on drugs." No policy runs so counter to well-established research or law enforcement views, yet at the same time no policy is more heavily defended politically as "essential" and "unquestioned."

"Last week saw the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. In Washington, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) - a group of former cops and drug-war veterans who have soured on America's war on drugs - gathered to celebrate the anniversary, and to argue for an end to America's current prohibition on marijuana and more serious drugs.

Essentially, they believe that the war on drugs creates criminals. Richard Van Wickler, a onetime New Hampshire county corrections superintendent, noted during a LEAP conference call last week that despite America's drug laws, 114 million Americans (out of more than 300 million) have used illegal drugs, 35 million of them in the last year. The law is not much of a deterrent.

World Health Organization researchers found that 42.4 percent of Americans had tried marijuana - the highest ratio of any of 17 countries surveyed. New Zealand, which has tough drug policies, scored a close second place at 41.9 percent. Dutch residents can buy cannabis at coffee shops, yet less than 20 percent of Dutch respondents said they had tried cannabis. Researchers concluded, "Drug use does not appear to be related to drug policy, as countries with more stringent policies (e.g., the United States) did not have lower levels of illegal drug use than countries with more liberal policies (e.g. the Netherlands)."

Meanwhile, drug prohibition does work, Van Wickler added, as "a wonderful opportunity for organized crime."

read it all here

Wall Street Chasing Performance through Chemistry

“It’s like they’re chasing a dream. Even when they make tremendous profits, they’re still worried,” he said.

Alden Cass, a clinical psychologist who counsels Wall Streeters with drug addictions, said drug abuse and high anxiety are undercurrents to the current boom.

“When things are really good, they feel invulnerable,” Cass said. “That can lead to adultery, substance abuse, problems with the law.”

When it comes to profits, things are really good.

Six of the largest U.S. investment banks — Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, JPMorgan & Chase Co., Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns — combined for $17.6 billion in first-quarter profit this year. That’s after shelling out $28.8 billion for pay and benefits, financial statements show.

Those profit and pay figures are more than double those seen in the first quarter of 2000, the last days before the dot-com bubble burst. New York’s comptroller estimates Wall Street’s 2006 bonuses will generate $1.6 billion in state tax revenue.

Cocaine and hillbilly heroin
“To my knowledge, we have not seen an uptick in drug use,” Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jean Marie McFadden said.

The other five firms declined comment or did not return telephone calls.

But Cass said opiate abuse among his clients is rising and they openly talk about being hooked on prescription drugs like OxyContin, known as hillbilly heroin.

“That’s what has changed from previous booms on Wall Street,” he said.

Cass and Stratyner said their clients sometimes conceal their habits by taking prescription drugs they get for back surgery or sports-related injuries. The Internet has also expanded the black market for drugs.

Wall Street professionals in their 20s use Ritalin and Adderall, prescription drugs used to treat attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity, to enhance their performance as they grind out 100-hour weeks, Cass said.

Big bonuses and the need to blow off steam have helped invigorate demand for cocaine in Manhattan, according to two junior bankers who did not want to be named.

Juan Rodriguez, convicted of selling drugs to investment bankers and other professionals, said his clients never complained about the price of cocaine, even as it escalated.

“My customers were all business individuals,” Rodriguez said, citing Morgan Stanley bankers as among his clients.

Morgan Stanley said the company has a strong policy against substance abuse and uses random drug testing.

Passing the test
One hiring manager at a major New York bank said new staff must take a urine test, which is typical for the industry. But he said new hires can choose when to schedule the test during a 45-day period before their start date.

“Our drug test is not so much a test of whether you actually take drugs as it is an intelligence test to see if you can figure out how long it takes to get traces of the drug out of your system,” said the manager, who asked not to be named.

The hiring manager said his employer also had a policy of random drug tests for employees but that in several years he had never encountered anyone subjected to such a test.

Drugs are not the only reason for executive meltdowns.

Overwhelming pressure and anxiety to meet profit goals undid star trader David Becker as he rose the Citigroup ladder.


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Nine months after becoming global commodities chief, Becker found himself on the fast track to prison. The largest U.S. bank discovered in 2004 that Becker and others conspired to overstate profits by $20 million.

Becker, 41, pleaded guilty and is serving a 15-month sentence in federal prison. He declined to comment.

Before he committed his crime, he sought psychiatric help to deal with the pressure of balancing family and career, court papers show.

A metaphor for his life was a painting he owned depicting a man being pulled by all four limbs, Becker’s psychiatrist, Dr. Barbara Deutsch, wrote to the judge in the case.

“He felt enormous pressure to make the group’s budget at all costs,” Deutsch wrote. “He felt identified with this tortured man.”