Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State, The Opium Wars in Afghanistan

Quote: "During the CIA's covert war in the 1980s, opium financed the mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as President Ronald Reagan called them) who finally forced the Soviets to abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist client state".

The U.S., through the CIA, also financed, armed, trained, ... and managed the mujahideen. Osama bin Laden was one of their main agents, say. The CIA, from what I recall, provided financing, arms, and possibly some of the training through the Pakistani ISI, a number of people have said in their articles, but they and/or others have also said that Osama bin Laden, f.e., worked directly with the CIA and that his direct boss was of the CIA.

I don't know that the Afghan peasant farmers were refining opium, or processing it to transform it, into heroin in their mud huts. What little I've read of this is that the Afghans formerly did not perform the transformation, but, instead, only produced the raw material, opium, which would have been exported for processing to transform it into heroin; however, since this war on Afghanistan, or maybe a little before it, processing into heroin began to be done in Afghanistan.

And Russia would've never had anything to do with this, though it had allies with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, which was led by drug and war lords, while the Taliban weren't drug lords and also weren't allies with the Northern Alliance or Russia. But from what I've read, this is all that Russia would've indirectly had to do with the drug production in Afghanistan.

President Reagan surely was in part right, though I don't know that he was. However, if what's quoted above about what he said is all he said about it, then he clearly wasn't more than half right and evidently would've been kept "in the dark". By whom? Well, the VP was GHW Bush and he very likely would've been the culprit, say, for he surely knew what was going on in Afghanistan. From what I recall having read, his ties, apparently dark-alliance sort of ties, with the CIA reach back to before he became member of the CIA, which was to set a precedent, for he was the first person to become a CIA director without having, first, been an official member of the CIA. Wikipedia's history about him does show that he wasn't officially a member of the CIA before becoming director, and I don't know if the same page refers to his prior relationships with the CIA, relationships I believe to have read started a decade or more earlier, but there are people who've written and who seem to be honest about this apparently disregarded or underreported history.

Anyway, he evidently was a more powerful individual than President Reagan was. I additionally read that Ronald Reagan didn't want to accept GHW Bush as VP running-mate, but accepted after being threatened by some rich elite in the U.S., in the U.S. media, I think, who said that Reagan better accept Bush as running-mate, or the election was guaranteed to go to Reagan's electoral opponent. I read about this in an article entitled, "Reagan dead 23 years after hit by Bush cabal", which was originally posted, or at least it's where I read it and where other websites have copies of the piece from, at LibertyThink (I believe .com or .org). It's a compilation of reports from a few or more news media and concludes with a very interesting theory, say, of the 9/11 Citizens Watch, who wrote about how the attempted assassination on President Reagan within a couple of months or so after his first election to the presidency occurred. That explanation and the theory or suspicion derived from the detailed description of how the attempted assassination occurred is very credible and if it's true, then it's a very dark part of GHW Bush's history. Actually, it'd be a very dark part of both his and the U.S. Secret Service's history.

Copies of the article are still available at other websites, easily found with a Google search. The website, www.libertythink.com, still exists, but I tried Googling it to find the article and this failed, so I tried with the website's search engine, but it only allows going back three months. Maybe people registered for accounts at the website can get older articles, but I won't create an account just to check this. Copies can be found at other websites.

The copy I'm looking at right now, for it's the first link returned by Google, is at infowars.com and it's correctly dated, June 6, 2004, but I'm not sure that it's a wholly exact or complete copy of what I read. However, I just read a little over the part about Ronald Reagan having been politically threatened into accepting GHW Bush as running-mate, and the description of the attempted assassination. I recall these parts, so the copy of the article at infowars.com is exact enough; however, I don't seem to recall having seen the name of Rockefeller, f.e. But I read the piece the same month it was first published, so some detail could've certainly been forgotten, by now.

And that seems to be the only copy found with Google. The other links returned are either to no longer found pages, or to a book at Google and it only provides non-linked references to the article.

I agree with what that article says or quotes in terms of GHW Bush, as VP, having been more powerful or powerfully influential than President Reagan, and I posted several times over recent years that I believed that the real President apparently wasn't as much Bush Jr as it was Dick Cheney; but I might be mistaken in the latter case. Maybe they were equally chief, c-in-c. Otoh, they sure made sure that Bush Jr wouldn't be at the White House on the morning of 9/11, making sure that he would be sitting in some children's classroom reading "pet goat" with them in Florida, instead. That seems like a weird or extremel unusual thing for a President to do, imo.

Anyway, back to what I last quoted from Prof. Alfred McCoy's article regarding the words of President Reagan, it's foolish or naive to take the words of any U.S. politicians at face value when they appear innocent. I wouldn't treat President Reagan's words as more than speaking about a very little part of the whole story.

Re. Obama going to Afghanistan

Quote: "Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National Security Adviser James L. Jones assured reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers." The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of the economic engine for the insurgents.""

Again, I would not treat that as very significant. It seems like more stage show'ism, imo.

Re. the heroin production and trafficking

I've read some very good articles in the past at www.globalresearch.ca about this topic and am now trying to do a quick search to be able to include some links.

"Afghanistan: Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time

by Craig Murray, Daily Mail, UK, July 24, 2007

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6405

His knowledge of this, during the present war anyway, is from his "time as British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004", and he provides quite an account, one you wouldn't want to miss knowing about.

Another bio. for him from another article at GR reads, "As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region".

Referring to the first thing or one of the first things commented on earlier in this post, the financing of the 1980's, he says, "Afghanistan was indeed the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden and his organisation, who had been installed and financed there by the CIA to fight the Soviets from 1979 until 1989".

Re. the GDP in relation to heroin, and Taliban relationship to the trade, historically, maybe they did have some direct, for-profit relationship at some point, but Craig Murrary says the following.

In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?

The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.

The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.

That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. Nobody has denied the sincerity of the Taliban's crazy religious zeal, and they were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

They stamped out the opium trade, and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.

That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; ....

Re. where the heroin was, formerly, made from opium, and where, with the present war, it's being made since the war started, he says the following.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government – the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.

"Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War"

by Prof Peter Dale Scott, Jan. 1, 2010

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16713

"Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State"

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott, May 8, 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13524

In his author index at GR, there clearly are two other related articles by him, "Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection", posted Sept. 19, 2008, originally of Sept. 6th, 2008, and "9/11 in Historical Perspective: Flawed Assumptions. Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism, A briefing for Congressional staff", posted July 29, 2005, originallyof July 22nd, 2005.

The latter article was originally from his website, which is linked in the page for the article at GR, so I'll excerpt some of the start of it.

The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of Iraq.

The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”[1]

To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda.[2] In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in trafficking Afghan heroin.

America’s sponsorship of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including those now in Al Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of 1979-89, sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).[3] It was part of CIA Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert operations over and above those approved and financed by a Democratic-controlled Congress.

The most conspicuous example of this alliance with drug-traffickers in the 1980s was the Contra support operation. Here again foreign money and drug profits filled the gap after Congress denied funds through the so-called Boland amendments; in this case government funds were used to lie about the Contras to the American people.[4] This was followed by a massive cover-up, in which a dubious role was played by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, later of the 9/11 Commission.[5]

The lying continues. The 9/11 Commission Report assures Americans that “Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States.”[6] This misleading statement fails to consider that: ....

For the following articles, I'll just specify the titles, authors, and dates, and the links can be found by going to either the Afghanistan index through the Country index linked in the homepage of GR, or by using the author index.

"Who benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?",

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Sept. 21, 2006

"The Spoils of War: Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade
Washington's Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade"

by Michel Chossudovsky, May 5, 2005, but, and oddly, originally of June 14, 2005

Those dates must've been specified in reverse order, for I wrote them in the order they appear in the article and the second date, when specified, is for the original date; normally, that is.

"Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan"

by Vladimir Radyuhin, Frontline, Feb. 24, 2008

That article begins with a GR editor's note and this is followed by an AFP article that's actually entitled, "Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan", and is or was by John MacDougall, for AFP. I'll excerpt the GR editor's note.

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of

Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence

.

February 23, 2008

I believed, so much, that the U.S. military, some people in its high ranks, would not hesitate to traffic or transport heroin that when the scandal about the Bush Jr-Cheney administration refusing to allow the coffins of soldiers KIA and being returned to the U.S. to be photographed and, therefore, seen up close, I posted the hypothetically based question of what precisely was inside those coffins. And I did the same thing some years ago when then reading about the U.S. military placing large and closed or enclosed crates in a rather huge military plane while no one except for very, very few people could really know what was inside of those crates.

It's not like the criminals behind and profiteering from these wars having caring hearts about other people's feelings! And as stated earlier in this post, or maybe it was in my first post, the U.S. military and surely CIA, etcetera, planes returning from outside of the country most surely or definitely don't go through inspections before what is on these planes is allowed to be removed or moved in the U.S.

I don't want to be disgusting, but those coffins could've been filled with heroin! Like some do-dos question when "9/11 truthers" like myself state that AA flight 77 clearly was not what hit the Pentagon and that nothing like this type of plane did, the latter ask, f.e., "Well then, where did 77 go?", to which there's a simple answer, which is that the question is a [separate] question, while the matter being referred to is what did and did not hit the Pentagon. We don't need to know where 77 went in order to be able to see that it clearly did not hit the Pentagon. Well, the answer can be simpler to figure out in terms of soldiers KIA in Afghanistan and whose coffins are actually returned with something other than their bodies in them. These soldiers could've easily been buried in Afghanistan and with very, very few people knowing about; nearly no one. Only a few people would know.

Re. flight 77, everyone with a clear and open mind can view all of the evidence for the plane not having been what hit the Pentagon, and the extreme, really total, lack of evidence for the contrary to be true. Where 77 went, well, evidently very, very few people know where it went. But there are reports about AA having inititally and quickly stated that 77 never even flew on 9/11, a statement that AA supposedly did later reverse, but then it'd be necessary to find out how it could be that the airline company wouldn't have known what the truth was to begin with.

Mike Corbeil