Afghan drugs, poverty and anger fuel Taliban war
…”There was hope among people after the Taliban’s ouster that things would improve economically, Afghanistan would be reconstructed. But it seems those hopes did not come true,” Mozhdah said.
The Western-backed government’s efforts to eradicate opium-growing were also playing into the hands of the Taliban.
“Instead of arresting officials involved in trafficking the government has resorted to punishing poor farmers. That has caused anger.”
news.yahoo.com
Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA
‘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 hindquarters,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.
$4b later, drugs still flow in Colombia
TUMACO, Colombia — Six years and $4 billion into the US-backed campaign to wipe out cocaine at its source, Colombia appears to be producing more coca than when the campaign started, according to US government estimates.
As Congress opens debate this month on another $640 million for next year for Washington’s most ambitious overseas counternarcotics effort, a growing number of critics say the costly program has neither dented the cocaine trade nor driven down the number of American addicts. Two of the program’s major missions — to dramatically reduce coca growing in Colombia and provide alternative livelihoods for drug farmers — have fallen far short of hoped-for goals.
Onetime supporters, including some Republican lawmakers who championed the plan at its creation, are now demanding to know why the most expensive US foreign aid program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan is not winning the war on drugs.