Washington's unsavory antidrug partners.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen
• Position: Worldview

AMERICAN OFFICIALS have frequently cooperated with unsavory regimes in an attempt to stem drag trafficking, even when Washington has treated those regimes as pariahs on all other issues. A graphic example of that dual approach occurred in May, 2002, when a senior member of the military junta ruling Burma, Col. Kyaw Thein, came to Washington for discussions with Bush Administration officials on ways to improve his government's efforts to eradicate illicit opium production. Kyaw met with Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers, as well as officials of the Drag Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Justice and Treasury departments, and the White House Office of National Drag Control Policy.

Kyaw's visit was curious on multiple levels. He was a prominent figure in the junta that had strangled Burma's aspirations for democracy and harassed the leader of the democratic forces, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, for years. That mistreatment has included placing her under house arrest for nine months--an episode that had just ended in early May. Kyaw's trip was a departure from the ban imposed in 1996 on visits to the U.S. by high-ranking members of the junta. Indeed, Kyaw had been specifically named as being ineligible to receive a visa. Yet, to discuss drug policy, he was now welcome in Washington. His visit could not even be interpreted as a reward to Burma's military leaders for freeing Suu Kyi. Administration officials conceded that the visit had been planned for weeks--long before her release. Yet, the Administration emphasized that the extensive talks with Kyaw did not herald a loosening of the economic sanctions that had been imposed on Burma. Cooperation was to take place on the drag issue alone.

That was not the first time U.S. officials had sought to make an exception to general policy toward Burma in the name of waging the war on drags. In 1995, Lee P. Brown, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under Pres. Bill Clinton, led a push for expanded cooperation with the Burmese military to eradicate poppy fields and arrest traffickers. Thomas A. Constantine, director of the DEA; Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard; and Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy E. Wirth supported Brown's effort. They waged their campaign even though the State Department's most-recent human rights report had concluded that Burma had a highly authoritarian regime that had killed or jailed its political opponents, squelched free speech and demonstrations, and impressed thousands of people into forced labor to assist the military.

Brown summarized his attitude and that of his colleagues on that uncomfortable issue: "I'm very concerned about human rights violations in Burma. But I'm equally concerned about human rights in America and the poison being exported from Burma that ends up on the streets of our cities." In other words, fighting drag trafficking took precedence over any qualms Americans might have about the brutally repressive nature of the Burmese junta. Although Brown did not get his wish entirely, some American cooperation with Burma continued throughout the remainder of the 1990s, despite Washington's overall policy of trying to isolate the military regime.

Throughout the decades since Pres. Richard Nixon first proclaimed a war on drags in 1971, the U.S. has repeatedly made a "drug war exception" in its foreign policy toward repugnant and repressive regimes. Policy toward Burma has been by no means an aberration. The U.S. adopted a similar approach to Panama's dictator, Manuel Noriega; Peru's authoritarian president, Alberto Fujimori; and even Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Incredibly, Washington even sought to cooperate with the infamous Taliban regime in Afghanistan and praised its effort to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppies.

When the Taliban announced a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001, U.S. officials were most complimentary. James P. Callahan, director of Asian affairs for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, uncritically relayed the alleged accounts of Afghan farmers that "the Taliban used a system of consensus-building" to develop and implement the edict. That characterization was more than a little dubious, since the Taliban was not known for pursuing consensus in other aspects of its rule. Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer was scathing in his criticism of the U.S. response. "That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on farmers is not surprising," he noted, but Sheer contended that "it is grotesque" for a U.S. official to describe the drug-crop crackdown in such benign terms.

The Bush Administration did more than praise the Taliban's announced ban on opium cultivation. In mid May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell...