Another Cost of America’s Proxy Wars: Enhancing the Drug Trade

After our costly defeat in Vietnam, our foreign policy leaders turned to the use of proxy armies to fight our battles for us. As the Nixon doctrine put it: Asian boys must fight Asian wars.

Arming others to fight our perceived enemies for us turned out to have some very high costs. Some of the people we hired, including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, tended to turn on us in a deadly fashion. But there is another cost associated with what we have had to do to finance these clandestine proxy wars, namely our involvement in the international drug trade.

Our alliance with drug lords to fight our enemies began with the CIA’s recruitment of a large army of Laotian Hmong to fight a secret war against the Vietnamese. One of the important cash crops for the Hmong was opium, the precursor for the production of heroin. The airstrips the CIA built throughout Laos to allow us to supply that secret army were also used by the same military leaders to collect and export their drugs. The factories converting the opium to heroin were located in the same Laotian center that housed the CIA’s headquarters for clandestine operations in northern Laos. Unfortunately, the most profitable market for that heroin was our troops in Vietnam.

The same pattern emerged in our battle against the Sandinista leftists that controlled Nicaragua. When the American Congress limited the appropriated funds that could be spent supporting our proxy army, the Contras, because of their connection with death squads and other terrorist activities, those operations became increasingly dependent on the cocaine trade. The cocaine flowed north to the United States and the weapons and explosives flowed south to the Contras. Again, our drive to undermine a leftist government justified the “drugs for guns” trade even when it was our citizens who were the indirect victims of that trade.

We faced the same problem as we organized the resistance to the Soviet troops that occupied Afghanistan. One indigenous group that was in open rebellion against the Soviets was the Afghan drug lords. To the CIA it was a perfect opportunity: Local leaders who were hostile to the Soviets and who could also generate a huge flow of funds to finance a decade long insurgency. The American supported Afghan jihad and its Pakistani supporters created a major opium-heroin drug center that by the end of the 1980s was producing 75 percent of the world’s opium. Our moral justification was that anything that killed Russian soldiers and helped bleed the Soviet Union to death had to be ok.

The point of recalling these sordid aspects of our past foreign adventures is to underline two dangerous aspects of our foreign policy. The first is the use of secret proxy armies funded by clandestine sources to do our dirty work for us. The whole point of these proxy forces and their secret funding is to put them beyond the reach of Congress and the American people. They are explicitly anti-democratic, not accountable, and irresponsible. It should not be surprising that the blowback from them has often been destructive to America itself.

The second concern is the moral shield we have consistently used to dismiss any suggestion that there is something ethically corrosive about our behavior. That moral shield is the belief in American exceptionalism: We are unlike other nations. We do not pursue our self-interest or empire. We are the shining city on the hill, chosen by God to change the world for the better. Because we are so chosen, because we are exceptionally pure, anything we do in the pursuit of our mission is ethically acceptable. There can be no conflict between our actions and our values because our values are so obviously correct and pure that any action in their pursuit is justified.

And so we have deployed terrorists against our enemies, only to have them turn on us. We have assisted in the production and distribution of drugs that have poisoned our own soldiers and sent a substantial fraction of the young non-white population of our nation to jail. Our leaders consciously misled the Congress and people to justify a unilateral invasion of a nation halfway around the world. Once there, while our brave soldiers got picked off one by one, others were encouraged to engage in the most degrading of behavior in order to torture information out of captives.

If other nations or other people did these things, we would label them terrorists or tyrants or war criminals. But because we believe we as a nation and people are exceptional with a special historical mission, we can do these things while declaring and believing in our own innocence.

But this is simply dangerous self-deception. The rest of the world sees us for whom were are, a well meaning people as flawed in our international behavior as any other nation. As the morass in Iraq demonstrates, unilateral, preemptive use of force creates problems, not solutions. The problems we as a nation face are also faced by most of the other nations of the world. Solving them will require close cooperation not the arbitrary exercise of our military might. The need to build and maintain alliances will also force us to be more critical and careful about the covert operations we carry out against other governments. That, too, can only be for the good, discouraging a repetition of some of our more harebrained international adventures.