If the United States surrenders in its war on drugs, it could better fight the war on terror.

As the G20 finance ministers meet in Ottawa this weekend, they’ll be asked to come up with common measures to attack the financial sources of terrorism. A laudable goal, if it can be accomplished without targeting necessary financial networks for dispossessed minorities around the world, as we’ve seen in the case of the Somali Hawala in Ottawa this week.

But Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin said yesterday that cutting off funding for terrorism involves much more. “It’s not enough to talk about co-operation only in terms of terrorist financing,” Martin told CBC radio. “We’ve got to talk about it in terms of provision of healthcare, education for young women in Africa. I really believe that, based on a world of nation-states, we now have a tremendous opportunity to advance the yardsticks in how the world governs itself.”

If Martin were a female university professor of colour instead of our country’s minister of finance, he’d likely find himself denounced on editorial pages across the nation as a “root-causer” with dangerous terrorist tendencies. It’s almost enough to win my vote. While I disagree with much of Martin’s policy agenda, I’ve always respected his ability to actually address issues in intelligent terms.

But if Martin wants to broaden the discussion to seriously address financing for the guys in the black turbans in this so-called war on terrorism, he would have to admit it would also involve raising a white flag in the war on drugs.

Talking honestly about this issue cuts to the heart of American Puritanism and, thus, would likely be impossible with a fundamentalist in the White House. But if the G20 finance ministers want to know why any al-Qaeda fanatic or regional warlord can finance training camps, huge arms purchases and standing armies around the world, much of the answer is in the international drug trade.

Raising the burqa on the U.S. war on some drugs (just as it’s conducting a war on some terrorists) would do more to end terrorism — not to mention biker wars — than any Patriot Act. The drug warriors will no doubt respond that their failing efforts in this two-decade-old war need to be redoubled. Even if they could make a bigger dent in drug-smuggling volumes, however, that would only succeed in raising the street prices for drugs, not to mention the incentive and profits for smugglers. It’s a self-defeating enterprise that costs the U.S. and other countries billions, ruins millions of lives, helps corrupt democracies and has seriously eroded civil liberties in the U.S. even before September 11.

There is also direct evidence the blinkered vision of the drug war helped shelter al-Qaeda terrorists in the U.S.

Kevin Zeese, president of the Common Sense for Drug Policy south of the border, says that’s what happened when Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in the 1990s actually apprehended Raed Hijazi, an admitted al-Qaeda member. Hijazi, according to the reports, provided the agents with information on the Boston-area terrorist cell later involved with the September 11 hijackings. But the FBI reportedly was interested only in information Hijazi had on heroin trafficking.

Then again, the murkier parts of several U.S. administrations have always been willing to turn a blind eye to drug smuggling by its friends, including now the Northern Alliance. The fractious anti-Taliban rebels supplied up to 80 per cent of Afghanistan’s opium to the world’s heroin processors before they took over most of the country in the past week. I imagine that figure will now grow to close to 100 per cent.

There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest the Central Intelligence Agency, at the very least, turned a blind eye to the cocaine smuggling by its Contra proxy army during the war on Nicaragua in the 1980s, which fuelled the explosion of crack on America’s inner-city streets. The U.S. is now tacitly condoning cocaine production by brutal rightwing paramilitary groups in Colombia, even as it poisons the coca fields that fund the leftwing FARC rebels in that country.

I’m not naive. There’s about as much chance the G20 would attack the real sources of terrorist financing as the prospect the U.S. would begin to intelligently address its addictions, not only to illegal drugs, but to other substances that fuel conflicts, such as oil. But it would be great if Paul Martin happened to point it out on a world stage.