“An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said,” reports the New York Times. “We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack,” Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and “militants,” that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.
Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade–in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called “Golden Crescent” (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)–was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban–at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter–are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.
“ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels … engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government,” writes historian William Blum. “The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies,” and also because selling heroin and spreading misery is highly profitable. In fact, the Soviets attempted to impose an opium ban on the country and this resulted in a revolt by tribal groups eventually exploited by the CIA and Pakistan.
“Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism,” write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided “not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop,” Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush’s illegal invasion of the country was well underway. “Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. … The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade.” In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.
Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. “Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world’s heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing,” notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:
Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world’s heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year–nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA’s Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller’s banks.
It also put a pinch on the criminals and gangsters in Pakistan. “The Taliban’s actions … (destroying the opium crop) severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them,” explains From the Wilderness. “Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year,” not exactly small potatoes.
In 2004, according to research conducted by the Democratic Policy Committee, after “decreasing dramatically under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now [2004] produces nearly 3/4 of the world’s opium. CIC [Center for International Cooperation] found that ‘opium production, processing, and trafficking have surged, with revenues equaling roughly half of the legal economy of Afghanistan.’ It is estimated that 1.7 million people, or 7 percent of the total population now grow poppies,” all of this under the United States installed government of Hamid Karzai, the ex-Unocal employee.
But then none of this should be surprising–the CIA and neolib financiers and moneymen have long dabbled in drug dealing and drug addiction profiteering.
In addition to turning immense profits for societal parasites and other cockroach infestations on Wall Street, drug dealing is a great way for the government to intervene in the business of other nations, as Oliver North well understands (as the Contra was funded by the smuggling of cocaine). “The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by criminal narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging narco-militarists and corrupted politicians… This is really NEO-narco-colonialism, whereby local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies’ illicit pipelines, the result is still a functional narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action,” summarizes the CIA & Drugs website,
http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/index.html.
So it is not surprising, as the New York Times puts it, there is a “Sudden Rise of Violence in Afghanistan” and the predictable murder of “a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement.” In Afghanistan, the Hegelian dialect is working overtime–the U.S. government engineers the Afghan opium trade, thus resulting in social problems and violence associated with illicit drug distribution and consumption, and then turns around and organizes police training programs to combat the scourge it has spawned.
As well, for the Fabian socialist globalists, it is a great way to break down borders and implement “free trade zones,” that is to say unhindered thievery zones. Call it a “war on drugs” or the endless war against “terrorism” (yet another Hegelian contrivance), it is all engineered to turn the world into a large slave plantation ruled by a decadent and debased elite cadre of neoliberal criminals.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, with an introduction by Jeffrey St. Clair is now available through Dandelion Books: $17.95 trade paperback. He can be reached at: [email protected].
