Johann Hari

This week, the British army is battering its way into a staggering, starving region – a place where half the people are suffering from malnutrition – to hack to pieces the only profitable crop they have.

Sayed Rikan is a terrified 43 year-old opium farmer from the East of Afghanistan, and he told me yesterday, “My village depends on growing opium for us to eat. We grow the [opium] poppies for survival, for life." He explained his reasons for this risky decision: "We have a long drought in Afghanistan, for six years now, and the poppy does not need much water to grow. And please understand: one kilo of opium makes $150. Seven kilos of wheat makes $1. When you are hungry and your children are dying, this is no choice.”

Some Sayeds will fight back against Our Boys to protect the thin row of poppies standing between them and starvation – in which case they will be shot.

Sayed is not alone. Some 60 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP stems from the heroin trade – and the US and Britain are committed to systematically destroying it. Sayed has already seen them try to do this once. “Last year, a plane appeared at midnight in the sky and it let out a long green spray over our fields,” he says. “Animals started to die and the people outside began to cough and be sick. The next day, all the crops died. Not just the poppies. The wheat, the fruit trees, everything. Now nothing grows there.” The British and Americans officially deny this policy of “fumigation”, so no compensation has been paid to Sayed and his neighbours, even though they starved for weeks as they trudged to new land. (Some were so disgusted they trudged off to join the jihadists of the Taliban). A similar US-led campaign of chemical poisoning has been linked to an epidemic of cancers in Colombia.

“Yes, we expect them to come to our new fields,” Sayed says. The Afghan Human Rights Organisation says that British troops oversee the destruction of opium fields “though chemicals and manually, where they hack the crops apart with sticks.” Never mind that most Afghans are already dead by the age of 45. Never mind that a quarter of their children never reach their fifth birthday. There’s a “war on drugs” on, and the Anglo-American alliance puts this attempt to wipe out heroin – which their own officials say is a “totally ineffective” way to reduce drug use back home – before Afghan life.

While British troops touched down for this programme of economic vandalism in the Helmand province, Tony Blair was proudly unveiling a plan for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in London. Nobody noted the irony. But so long as the international prohibition of drugs continues, any plan to unite and rebuild Afghanistan might as well be stuffed into a crack-pipe and smoked. Criminalizing heroin has one effect, and one effect only: it hands the industry over to armed gangsters. That’s bad enough on a British council estate, where they fill the area with guns and panicky sweat. But in Afghanistan, it means 60 percent of the country’s economy is controlled by armed gangs – increasingly accountable to the woman-hating, psychopathic Taliban – who have a vested interest in keeping the country in chaos. They will always have more cash and more guns than the elected government – so Hamid Karzai, the elected President, will remain forever the Governor of Kabul, gazing out at a narco-state he does not control.

This “war on drugs” is a massive gift to international gangsterism, radiating out from Afghanistan across the world. It hands them a £5bn-a-year industry, tax-free. This isn't merely the view of leftie legalizers like myself –the gangsters themselves privately gloat about it. Michael Levine, America’s most distinguished federal narcotics agent, worked undercover with some of the world’s most powerful drugs cartels, and came face to face with (amongst others) la Mafia Cruzena, the Bolivian cocaine cartel. In his book ‘Fight Back’, he explains, “I learned that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it… The only US action they feared was an effective demand reduction program back home. On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business’.” When Levine recounted these comments to his boss – the officer in command of the paramilitary operation attacking South America – he replied, “Yeah, we know [military operations] don’t work, but we sold the plan up and down the Potomac.” There are Taliban warlords near Sayed right now drawing exactly the same gleeful conclusions as Jorge Roman.

Sometimes the drug warriors try to present a more moderate face than the slash-and-burn smoking through Helmand towards Sayed’s village. They propose ‘crop substitution’, which sounds like a good idea at first: rather than simply trash crops, why not pay the farmers to grow something else instead? There have been a few pilot schemes here and there, but the plans always smack up against an insurmountable problem: to replace the opium industry of Afghanistan alone would cost $5bn, which is more than the combined aid budgets every country in the world is offering to the country. It is not going to happen: crop substitution is a mere propaganda pill, offered to make the policy of destroying the livelihoods of desperately poor people sound less vicious. For Sayed, it mean being offered seven kilos of potatoes – and that’s it.

There are two possible futures for Afghanistan. In the first, Hamid Karzai responds to the clear democratic will of his people – “everyone I know wants the poppies to be legal,” Sayed says, and the Afghan Human Rights Organisation agrees – and legalises the supply of heroin. Only once Karzai can tax the country’s single biggest product and reclaim it from criminal gangs is there any chance of extending democratic rule beyond Kabul.

But the other, darker Afghanistan looks more likely – one where Karzai ignores his people and follow the dictates of the ex-drug user George W Bush to create a “drug-free Afghanistan”. This is a recipe for endless civil war, with a heroin-fatted Taliban launching more and more raids to burn girls’ schools and trash any rebuilding, far onto the historical horizon. “I do not want to live in that Afghanistan,” Sayed says softly.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments very welcome at johann@johannhari.com.

For more of my writings on drug legalisation, click on the 'archive' button above and then click on 'drugs'.

Why do societies in meltdown always make the best movies? Of the films competing to win this year’s little naked gold guy for Best Picture, only Crash is brilliant – and it’s a study of Los Angeles in the middle of a nervous breakdown, a racially stratified, morally stultified Babel shooting and looting itself to death. Hollywood only reaches its peak when America is losing the plot – it’s no coincidence that its Golden Ages were the dustbowl 1930s and Nixon-scarred 1970s. The Bush years can’t have bottomed-out yet – the movies aren’t great enough.

The best films I’ve seen this year are from countries coming apart at the seams – Iran and France. Michael Hanecke’s Arctic-cold ‘Hidden’ is a study of France’s relationship with its Muslim immigrants: a generation ago, Paris sent soldiers to torch and torture Algeria, only to quit and leave France to inhale hundreds of thousands of their victims. They were swiftly entombed in the countless concrete mazes ringing Paris. Here, they return to haunt a bourgeois white family – or do they? – by sending silent VHSes filmed from outside their house. It’s almost worth 30,000 blown-up cars for a wave of French movies as stunning as this.

I can’t stand it when politics is dumbed down to pointless chatter about personalities: is Brown charismatic enough? Has Cameron got the X Factor? But now everyone is condemning Simon Hughes, it’s tempting to say – okay, you want to talk character? When a 17 year old was butchered on an estate in Hughes’ constituency by a notorious hoarde of gangsters, nobody came forward as a witness. Hughes went door-to-door in an appeal, even though the police warned he was putting his life at risk. The gang took out a £10,000 contract on Hughes’ head. He has had Salman-style insecurity ever since. But because of him, the criminals were caught. Doesn’t that tell us more about Hughes than the trivial white lie he told about his genital preferences to protect his elderly mother?

In the mid-1990s – quick, put ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ on the jukebox – there was a twin-set of political clichés that ruled supreme. Class was dead, and talking about politics in terms of left and right was a dusty anachronism. Britain was a shiny meritocracy where anybody can make it and – as Tony Blair put it – “we are beyond left and right”. Anybody who insisted on clinging to these old terms was trapped in traffic on the road to Wigan Pier, believing in a Britain of flat-caps and feudal lords.

At first glance, their arguments have a catchy beat. Class is no longer so visually apparent: the landed estates and council estates of Britain have merged into a stylistic hodge-podge, with matching mockney accents and fake designer jeans. And we only think in terms of left and right because in one of the French Legislative Assemblies after the Revolution, the royalists who pined for a restoration sat to the right, while their opponents – the cheerleaders for revolution and equality – sat to the left. Do we really still live in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791?

But ten years and a thousand crumpled lines on the Prime Minister’s forehead on, class and the left/right distinction are still standing. Without these essential building blocks, political debate is reduced to a blanded-out spread-sheet where the electorate picks their CEO for Britain PLC. In this column, let’s clutch at a straw in the political wind – the Liberal Democrat leadership contest – and show how it is incomprehensible without exhuming these supposedly dead concepts.

So far, the Liberal Democrat contest has focused on two of the least fascinating topics in human history – the penises of Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes. But the outcome of this contest is too important to be reduced to the cretinized trivia of the News of the World. The decision made by Lib Dem members next month might determine the next government of this country. There is a slim but real possibility of the next election producing a hung parliament with Ming or Simon or Chris clutching the balance of power, forced to choose between creating a Brown or blue government. Most of us think the choice is obvious – aren’t the Lib Dems manifestly a party of the centre-left? But a very significant chunk of the Party – the cheerleaders for the 2004 privatise-the-NHS Orange Book – would want to hand David Cameron the keys to Number Ten. Mark Oaten would almost certainly have steered in this direction – and some believe Chris Hughne might be swayed that way too. Menzies Campbell has already made concessions to this uber-marketeering clique, dropping his commitment to a 50p top rate of tax. If Lib Dem members want to ensure their party would install Gordon Brown if it came to it, they should choose the unequivocal candidate of the left – Simon Hughes.

Ah, but what do these terms actually mean? Do left and right simply boil down to nodding towards Labour or Tory? These terms are confusing because their policies change over time. In the early nineteenth century, the Chartists spoke for the radical left when they demanded the vote for all adult men over the age of 21. If anybody advocated that programme today, they would be seen as unimaginably right-wing. Left and right are not determined by concrete policies but by class – whose interests do you put first?

For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War. An authoritative London School of Economics study has found that social mobility in Britain – the chances of a poor kid growing up to be rich, or vice versa – has simply ground to a halt. A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.

These are not arid academic questions. They can be weighed by the bluntest possible measure – dead babies. A baby boy in skint Hackney is twice as likely to die in the first year of his life as his cousin born in plush Bexley. This gap runs from cradle to grave: the poor die on average six years earlier than the rich, and health inequalities are now at their highest since Victoria was on the throne. As a recent King’s Fund study put it, “There are six stops on the Jubilee Line between Westminster and Canning Town. As you travel east, each Underground station marks a year less of life.”

So beneath the meritocratic sheen and the mockney voices, Britain has hardened into a caste society where birth decides worth (and death). The social escalator that carried so many people in my parents’ generation from the working class into a comfortable suburban existence ground to a halt the Thatcher years, and although the emergency alarm has been sounding for over a decade, few people seem to hear it. Some people – most notably Andrew Neil – have tried to blame the abolition of grammar schools for this collapse in social mobility, but the evidence does not seem to back this up. The countries that have very high social mobility – Sweden, Norway, Canada – have comprehensive schools with a real class mix. It isn’t educational structures that drag social mobility to a halt. It is low taxes, low investment and redistribution, and growing inequality – the subject of Neil’s wettest dreams. In every country, Thatcherizing has poured cement onto existing class structures.

Simon Hughes is of the left because he recoils from this. He believes politics should be about helping the people at the bottom by taxing more at the top. The Orange Book-ers, by contrast, are on the right because their decisions are oriented towards helping those who already have wealth and power. (It is common to hear this group insist class doesn’t exist while they claw and tear to get their children into a school purged of working class kids). Ming and Hughne seem to hover somewhere inbetween.

Without left and right, how could this difference be described? Even Tony Blair – the loudest exponent of ditching the distinction, once upon a time – has not been able to wriggle free from this vocabulary. A few weeks ago, he was challenged by Andrew Marr about his NHS reforms, and he said: “There's nothing right wing about saying to an old age pensioner, who is waiting in pain, we can get you your operation quicker, free at the point of use - that's not right wing, that's left wing.”

Left and right are not arthritic concepts – they are inescapable. But by stigmatising them as “old-fashioned”, the right has made it harder to make sense of the world and their domination of it. In the movie ‘The Usual Suspects’, Bryan Singer says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” The greatest trick the rich – and their cheerleaders on the right – ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn’t exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

Comments very welcome at j.hari@independent.co.uk

About two years ago I wrote an article about the British Stalin Society (yes, it really does exist), and this blogger discusses it interestingly.

HEADLINE: Damned If You Do, Saddam If You Don't

BYLINE: Radhakrishnan Nayar

BODY:
A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq Edited by Thomas Cushman University of California Press, 372pp, Pounds 35.95 and Pounds 13.95 ISBN 0 520 24486 9 and 24555 5

Together with an unending line of corpses torn apart by bombs and bullets, the Iraq war produced a singularly frenzied debate among Western intellectuals about the rights and wrongs of the US invasion. This richly informative book is a collection of essays almost all by pro-intervention writers. They explain what led them to a position hugely derided by the majority of the Western intelligentsia.

Some of the essayists are troubled by the practical sensibleness of America's actions, however sound the moral case. But only one opposes the invasion. Another, Johann Hari, though a supporter of the conquest, regards the motives behind it as suspect.

The best example of the ebullient drum beater for George W. Bush is probably Christopher Hitchens. In his usual truculent, monotonous prose, he sets out the reasons why his own erstwhile Western leftwing friends are so contemptibly wrong. Norman Geras, Ian Buruma, Anne Clwyd and others follow in a similar vein, drawing up, in the name of liberal internationalism, an apparently devastating moral indictment of anti-war liberal and leftwing opinion.

The case that emerges from nearly all these contributors' advocacy might be summarised thus: America, despite many deplorable mistakes, stands for humanitarianism in Iraq. A frivolous, kneejerk anti-Americanism has led much Western opinion culpably to ignore the fact that the terrifying human toll exacted by Saddam Hussein's regime would have continued had the US not deposed him. The despot's practices are well known: feeding victims into mincing machines, the use of meat hooks and poison gas. How can supposed liberals and leftwingers oppose acting to dispose of such a monster on grounds of Iraqi "sovereignty"? Even if no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were uncovered, why should the US regime have taken the risk of Saddam developing them?

Besides, the US is involved in something vital in the post-September 11 era: introducing liberalism into the Middle East. Subjects of tyranny elsewhere in the Middle East will see it is possible in the area to favour democracy and the US at the same time: a badly needed demonstration. And what if the US has been - and away from Iraq still is - the underwriter of cruel dictatorships in the Muslim world? Is the US forbidden to do good in Iraq because of its malign record in the region hitherto? As for armed resistance in Iraq to the US, opponents of the war are often appallingly oblivious to its ferociously Islamist nature.

A lot of what these writers say is true. Saddam's regime was one of murder and torture on a huge scale. Many prominent spokesmen for the Western anti-war movement - such as Michael Moore, John Pilger, George Galloway, Tariq Ali and George Monbiot - do indeed tend to demonise the US and overlook the heinous nature of its armed Islamist enemies. The victory of America's armed opponents would immensely boost militant Islam at its worst. It would impose a Taleban-style regime on Iraq and push the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world, into serious trouble.

Nonetheless, a comparison with George Orwell indicates what is wrong with these writers. Their case for Saddam's removal is formidable; but they show strikingly few doubts about US motives. Though sometimes bemoaning America's practical blunders in Iraq, they - with two exceptions - act as earnest spokesmen for Washington. (Tony Blair, supposedly representing "liberal statesmanship", is given two chapters to expound his views.) Orwell would not have fallen into that trap. He was a mordant critic of all established powers, not merely totalitarian ones. He chose Britain and the US against Nazi Germany, but he made it clear this was a forced choice of a lesser evil. He looked forward eagerly to the British Empire's demolition by anticolonial movements. He knew that to ascribe anything like consistently altruistic motives to powerful governments was folly.

These essayists lack Orwell's subtlety. They have nothing of his strongest trait as a political polemicist: refusal to underplay the negative aspects of the side he himself has to choose. They do not see that a very strong humanitarian case can be made against US invasion, too. Even if some kind of democracy comes to Iraq, it will be beholden to US power. Indeed, after their easy routing of Saddam's armies, the US forces gave every indication of settling in for a prolonged quasi-colonial rule of the world's second largest oil reserve. None of these essayists notes that it was the unexpected effectiveness of the Iraqi guerrilla resistance after Baghdad's fall that led the US to concede even theoretical sovereignty to Iraqis and hold elections without delay. Thus, uncomfortably for those who wish to see democracy in Iraq and a US willing to leave, progress has been dependent on blows struck by a viciously inhuman armed resistance. And what if the US does secure untroubled victory? This may well encourage Washington to move against Iran and/or Syria. In short, US victory, too, is likely to push the region and much of the rest of the world to the threshold of serious trouble.

Hari alone recognises that although Saddam's overthrow was hugely desirable, the US presence in Iraq is very problematic. Obviously, the ruthless resistance is not an alternative. Hari claims to have found a way out of this conundrum. Siding with the Iraqi people is the only decent choice, he argues. Opinion polls, he notes, indicate that the majority of Iraqis fervently wanted Saddam's Government smashed, even by a US invasion.

However, it is also clear that most now want the US out quickly, though - contradictorily - not until the Iraqi Army can cope with the Islamist insurgents. Hari is free of the credulity about US motives afflicting his fellow essayists. Yet even if Iraqi majority opinion is what he claims all it has needed to turn much of Iraq into hell is an armed minority. Hari does not indicate how US power can be controlled. We need a disinterested force to free the Iraqs of our world from their Saddam Husseins. No such force is in sight. Until we have it, those who believe that strong pro and anti positions can be taken in conflicts of this kind without associating oneself with wanton bloodshed and corruption are purveying an illusion.

Radhakrishnan Nayar is a writer on international affairs.