Afghanistan, Heroin, Addiction, Death

Thought it was time to do a post on Heroin.

Seems we have a world wide epidemic now.

The profiteers are happy. Billions of dollars happy.

The addicts and those who have to deal with them, are not so happy.

The farmers who grow it do not make a lot of money, but everyone after them does. They make a fortune. Typical in the profiteering business however.

Troops are busy still Gurading the fields

U.S. Marines with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 6, patrol through a poppy field during Operation Lariat in the Lui Tal district, Helmand province, Afghanistan, April 16, 2012. The Marines conducted the operation to disrupt enemy logistics and establish a presence in the area. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Ismael E. Ortega/Released)

Nov 5, 2012

$8.8M worth of heroin seized at Toronto airport-22 kg of the drug found in backpacks inside a box

Border services officers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport noticed a suspicious package unloaded from a plane from Pakistan last week and found 22 kilograms of heroin hidden inside.–For the rest of the story go HERE

Nov 5, 2012

Heroin user infected with anthrax in Oxford

2012

Case is the 12th in Europe since June and follows two deaths in Blackpool- For the rest of the story go HERE

Some soldiers are becoming addicts.

Addiction in the Ranks, Soldiers and Heroin

Canada faces flood of Heroin and Addicts

December 12, 2010

Treatment centres in cities around Canada are struggling to cope with a surge of addicts — many younger than ever before — who are hooked on a rising tide of heroin pouring into this country from war-torn Afghanistan.  For the rest of the story go HERE

Mar 12, 2010

By Kevin Hayden

For relatively pure heroin, cultivated and shipped from Afghanistan, the world’s largest supplier of heroin – it would net you $19,923,200 USD PER BARREL.

Now, by the time that hits American and Russian streets…and is cut up and diluted several times, you are looking at roughly $60,000,000 – $80,000,000 US dollars per barrel of heroin.

For the rest of the story go HERE

From 2009

Then we have the Soldiers making sure the poppy fields are safe.

A few pictures as well as reports.

Afghanistan: Troops Guarding the Poppy Fields

CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan

December 1, 2008

By Victor Thorn

Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”

Soon,  as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”

Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research, McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”

By 1994, a new force emerged in the region—the Taliban—that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that “the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”

These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West. Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.

In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction to this development. “When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn’t go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had lain the groundwork with

local warlords, he erupted, ‘I have all these guys under arms, and we’ve got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?’”

ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER

But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union. Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage “passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks”? The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage’s presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, “I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president.”

These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney’s former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder. More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea’s vast energy reserves was the Taliban.

Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the “Vulcans”—along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim—who coordinated Bush’s geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives. Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush’s deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.

Our “enemy,” or course, was the Taliban “terrorists.” But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad— who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as “supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being  “a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban.”

Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so. Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that “U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.” Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets? Source

A war for drugs.

Afghanistan’s Opium Trail, Documentary.

CBC Passionate Eye

Afghanistan – 10 Years of Failure & Oppression [Documentary]

Afghan children work in a poppy field in the area of Karez-e-Sayyidi, Helmand province, April 2010. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih

Afghanistan’s Child Drug Addicts

A little History

Secrets of the CIA

“The CIA is a state-sponsored terrorists association. You don’t look at people as human beings. They are nothing but pieces on the chessboard.” — Verne Lyon, former CIA agent in revealing documentary.

The UN Report documents how the world’s deadliest drug has created a market worth $65 billion, catering to 15 million addicts, causing up to 100,000 deaths per year, spreading HIV at an unprecedented rate.

You can thank the US invasion of Afghanistan for the problem.

UN World Drug Report 2012

Here there is a Map on drug use world wide. It was created using the statistics from the UN Report. It is not complete as there is nothing about Heroin use in Canada which of course is wrong, There are Heroin Addicts in Canada. But it does give you a good idea how wide spread the problem is. You can change the type of drug you want to look at on a world wide scale. Choices are Cannabis, Cocaine, Ecstasy, Amphetamines, Opiates/Heroin

Here is another map.

This map Can give a lot of details on Drug seizures.You can segregate by drug.

If you put in Heroin and Opium it is rather interesting.

Better still scroll down a bit and there is another Search you can do. “Search Events”, Try putting in the details you want. You can do it for a certain country and certain dates etc. So I put in Heroin and Opium. I choose dates from 2000 to now. I included all countries. There sure is a lot of Heroin and Opium out there.

I found that the info only goes back to 2009. Even so it is very informative.

The information is only the ones that were caught. So one can only imagine how much more is out there. Odds are there are also many events that are not listed. Finding them all would take  lot of time. Whoever runs the site has done an excellent job however.

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//

What I Learned in Afghanistan – About the United States

By Dana Visalli

May 7,2010

I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,” and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled “Silence is Violence,” that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the “30-year war” there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand stories like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.

Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….”).

The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable rights.

There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors, Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.

The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis Johnson, stated, “The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective.”

One Laotian female refugee recalled the years of bombing in this way: “Our lives became like those of animals desperately trying to escape their hunters . . . Human beings, whose parents brought them into the world and carefully raised them with overflowing love despite so many difficulties, these human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all. And who then thinks of the blood, flesh, sweat and strength of their parents, and who will have charity and pity for them? In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who suffer.”

In Cambodia, the United States was concerned that the North Vietnamese might have established a military base in the country. In response, The US dropped three million tons of ordnance in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 sites between 1964 and 1975. 10% of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8000 sites having no target listed at all. About a million Cambodians were killed (there was no one counting), and the destruction to society wrought by the indiscriminate, long-term destruction is widely thought to have given rise to the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded, in their hatred for all things Western, to kill another 2 million people.

Four days after Vietnam declared its independence on September 2, 1945, “Southern Korea” also declared independence (on September 6), with a primary goal of reuniting the country – which had been split into north and south by the United States only seven months before. Two days later, on September 8, 1945, the US military arrived with the first of 72,000 troops, dissolved the newly formed South Korean government, and flew in their own chosen leader, Syngman Rhee, who had spent the previous 40 years in Washington D.C. There was considerable opposition to the US control of the country, so much that 250,000 and 500,000 people were killed between 1945 and 1950 resisting the American occupation, before the actual Korean War even started.

The Korean War, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was an asymmetrical war, in which the highly industrialized and mechanized US pulverized the comparatively primitive North Korean nation. One third of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, a total of three million people (along with one million Chinese and 58,000 Americans). Every city, every sizable town, every factory, every bridge, every road in North Korea was destroyed. General Curtis LeMay remarked at one point that the US had “turned every city into rubble,” and now was returning to “turn the rubble into dust.” A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.” General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just “rubble or snowy open spaces.”

More napalm was dropped on Korea than on Vietnam, 600,000 tons compared to 400,000 tons in Vietnam. One report notes that, “By late August, 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson asks in this regard, “What it is like to pulverize ancient cultures into small pebbles, and not feel anything?”

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein came to power through a U.S.-CIA engineered coup in 1966 that overthrew the socialist government and installed Saddam’s Baath Party. Later conflict with Saddam let to the first and second Gulf Wars, and to thirteen years of severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq between the two wars, which taken together completely obliterated the Iraqi economy. An estimated one million people were killed in the two Gulf wars, and the United Nations estimates that the economic sanctions, in combination with the destruction of the social and economic infrastructure in the First Gulf War, killed another million Iraqis. Today both the economy and the political structure of Iraq are in ruins.

This trail of blood, tears and death smeared across the pages of recent history is the reason that Martin Luther King said in his famous Vietnam Speech that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Vietnam veteran Mike Hastie expanded the observation when he said in April of this year (2010) that, “The United States Government is a nonstop killing machine. The worst experience I had in Vietnam was experiencing the absolute truth of Martin Luther King’s statement. America is in absolute psychiatric denial of its genocidal maniacal nature.”

A further issue is that “war destroys the earth.” Not only does, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1960, “Every rocket fired signify a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” but every rocket that is fired reduces the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. In an ultimate sense it could be argued that those who wage war and those who pay for and support war, in reality bear some hidden hatred for life and some hidden desire to put and end to it.

What are our options? The short answer is, grow up. Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a “child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here.” There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.

“If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature,” wrote French author La Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience,” we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.” La Boétie wrote this in the year 1552, but people today remain slaves to external authority. “Our problem,” said historian Howard Zinn, “is not civil disobedience; our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.”

Do you want to spend your life paying for the death of people (executed by the US military) that you would probably have loved if you have met them? Do you want to spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements.” You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards, rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand your obedience and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your one precious chance at life.

“We must know how the first ruler came by his authority.” ~ John Locke

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Dana Visalli [dana@methownet.com] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp, Washington. Source

Updated Version in  pdf with photo’s go   HERE

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Losing Afghan hearts and minds

By Julien Mercille

May 7 2010

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan, according to a report by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) that gives a clear signal of the dangers of the military operation against Kandahar planned for this summer.

Contrary to its stated objectives of protecting the population from insurgents, NATO is actually raising the likelihood that poor Afghans will join the Taliban – not a great report card for General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, whose strategies seem to be backfiring.

The report, entitled Operation Moshtarak: Lessons Learned [1], is based on interviews conducted last month with over 400 Afghan men from Marjah, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar to investigate their views on the military operation to drive out the Taliban, launched in February in Helmand province, and its aftermath.

It corroborates previous assessments, such as one from the Pentagon released last week which concluded that popular support for the insurgency in the Pashtun south had increased over the past few months. Not one of the 92 districts that are deemed key to NATO operations supported the government, whereas the number of those sympathetic to or supporting the insurgency increased to 48 in March, from 33 in December 2009. [2]

There is no doubt Operation Moshtarak has upset Afghans: 61% of those interviewed said they now feel more negative about NATO forces than before the offensive. This plays into the insurgents hands, as 95% of respondents said they believed more young Afghans are now joining the Taliban. In addition, 67% said they do not support a strong NATO-ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) presence in their province and 71% said they just wanted foreign troops to leave Afghanistan entirely. Locals don’t have much confidence in NATO “clearing and holding” the area, as 59% thought the Taliban would return to Marjah once the dust settled, and in any case, 67% didn’t believe NATO and the Afghan security forces could defeat the Taliban.

The anger is easy enough to understand. Whereas aid agencies and human rights groups have estimated the number of civilian killed during Operation Moshtarak at fewer than 50, the great majority of respondents believe the toll to be about 200, or roughly a third of the number of insurgents killed; a “collateral damage” clearly too high to “win hearts and minds” – if such damage can ever be justified at all. Moreover, the operation against Marjah displaced about 30,000 people, many forced into refugee camps nearby with inadequate food, medical services or shelter. Such camps are good recruitment sites for the Taliban.

Locals say the main reason why their young men join the Taliban is for the job or money it provides, even if they don’t necessarily share the leaders’ ideological convictions. Indeed, the majority of those who join the ranks of the insurgency are often unemployed and disenfranchised. One solution could therefore be to spend more funds on reconstruction and development to generate employment. But this has never been a NATO priority: the US alone has spent US$227 billion on military operations in Afghanistan since 2001, while international donors together have spent less than 10% of that amount on development aid.

To make things worse, NATO seeks to eliminate the drugs industry, which makes up about 30% of the country’s total economy, often the best source of income for poor farmers. According to the ICOS report, eradication was opposed by 66% of those interviewed, not a surprising finding given that Helmand province cultivates over half the country’s poppies and produces about 60% of its opium, with Marjah dubbed by many to be Helmand’s “opium capital”. Even NATO’s new policy of paying farmers as an incentive for them to eliminate their own crops undermines the economy because sustainable alternative livelihoods are not offered.

The survey also points to a paradoxical finding: notwithstanding their negative perceptions about NATO, two-thirds of interviewees said foreign troops should clear the Taliban from the road linking Lashkar Gah to Kandahar and Kabul and start an operation against insurgents in Kandahar.

This apparent contradiction can be explained in immediate terms by the fact that locals wish to travel and conduct business more easily. From a broader perspective, it suggests that locals simply dislike both the Taliban and foreign troops. As summarized concisely by a major tribal leader from Kandahar, “Ten percent of the people are with the Taliban, 10% are with the government and 80% of the people are angry at the Taliban, the government and the foreigners.”

The roots of the dire situation of insecurity faced by many Afghans were explained by the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, who stated. “It was the international community that went to the warlords after the Taliban and brought them back,” with appalling consequences up to this day. [3]

Those views reflect those of democratic-minded Afghans such as member of parliament Malalai Joya and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who have been campaigning for years against both the Taliban and the warlords and their NATO backers. Yet, their views have been completely ignored by coalition governments.

Rather, NATO and US forces have specialized in (botched) night raids that kill civilians, including pregnant women as happened in February in Paktia province. McChrystal has increased those Special Operations Forces raids since he became the top commander in Afghanistan, skills he had previously honed as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008. Even though civilian deaths from air strikes have declined, those caused by night raids have increased, so much that the UN now estimates they account for half the civilians killed by foreign troops. This has contributed to the 33% increase in civilian deaths last month compared to the same period last year, adding to Afghans’ anger. [4]

Finally, 74% of those interviewed by ICOS support negotiations and dialogue with the Taliban, a clear sign that Afghans are tired of war. Bringing Taliban leaders in a political process already dominated by actors whose human rights record is atrocious might not be the ideal solution, but since in practice it is unlikely that NATO will push to have the warlords it allied itself with taken to court, it might be the best political alternative in the short term.

Notes
1. The International Council on Security and Development, formerly known as The Senlis Council, is an international think-tank known for its work in Afghanistan and other conflict zones such as Iraq and Somalia. It is a project of the Network of European Foundations’ Mercator Fund. ICOS currently runs three programs: Global Security, Public Security and Public Health and Drug Control.
2. Alissa J Rubin, US report on Afghan war finds few gains in six months. New York Times, April 29, 2010; Gareth Porter, Pentagon map shows wide Taliban zone in the South. Inter Press Service, May 1. 2010.
3. Kathy Gannon, Afghans blame both US, Taliban for insecurity. Associated Press, April 16, 2010.
4. Gareth Porter, Pentagon map belies Taliban’s sphere. Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.  Source

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Afghanistan: Troops Guarding the Poppy Fields

Paul Joseph Watson

Friday, November 20, 2009

Not content with savaging American taxpayers with two huge new financial burdens during an economic recession, in the form of health care reform and cap and trade, close allies of Barack Obama have proposed a new war surtax that will force Americans to foot the bill for the cost of protecting opium fields in Afghanistan, paying off drug lords, and bribing the Taliban.

Warning that the cost of occupying Afghanistan is a threat to the Democrats’ plan to overhaul health care, lawmakers have announced their plan to make Americans pay an additional war tax that will be taken directly from their income, never mind the fact that around 36 per cent of federal taxes already go to paying for national defense.

“Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for,” the lawmakers, all prominent Democratic allies of Obama, said in a joint statement on the “Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010 (PDF),” reports AFP.

The move is being led by the appropriately named House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey, Representative John Murtha, who chairs that panel’s defense subcommittee; and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.

The tax would apply to anyone earning as little as $22,600 per year in 2011.

The proposal is described as “heavily symbolic” with little chance of passing, but it once again illustrates the hypocrisy of an administration that swept to power on the promise of “change” to the Neo-Con imperial agenda and a resolve to reduce U.S. military involvement overseas. In reality, there are more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan now under Obama that at any time during the Bush administration.

At the height of the Bush administration’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq, there were 26,000 US troops in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq, a total of 186,000.

According to DoD figures cited by The Washington Post last month, there are now around 189,000 and rising deployed in total. There are now 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, over double the amount deployed there when Bush left office.

What precisely would this extra tax be used to pay for? Namely, bribing the Taliban, paying off CIA drug lords, and protecting heroin-producing opium fields.

Numerous reports over the past two weeks have confirmed that the U.S. military is paying off the Taliban with bags of gold to prevent them from attacking vehicle convoys, proving that there is no real “war” in Afghanistan, merely a business agreement that allows the occupiers to continue their lucrative control of record opium exports while they finalize construction of dozens of new military bases from which to launch new wars.

The Afghan opium trade has exploded since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, following a lull after the Taliban had imposed a crackdown. According to the U.N., the drug trade is now worth $65 billion. Afghanistan produces 92 per cent of the world’s opium, with the equivalent of at least 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year.

This racket is secured by drug kingpins like the brother of disputed president Hamid Karzai. As a New York Times report revealed last month, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a Mafia-like figure who expanded his influence over the drug trade with the aid of U.S. efforts to eliminate his competitors, is on the CIA payroll.

As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has highlighted in a series of essays, the explosion of opium production after the invasion was about the CIA’s drive to restore the lucrative Golden Crescent opium trade that was in place during the time when the Agency were funding the Mujahideen rebels to fight the Soviets, and flood the streets of America and Britain with cheap heroin, destroying lives while making obscene profits.

Any war surtax will merely go straight to maintaining the agenda that Obama inherited from Bush, the continued looting of Afghanistan under the pretext of a “war on terror” that, as revelations about bribing the Taliban prove, doesn’t even exist.

Source

Afghanistan opium poppy cultivation 1994-2007

The Taliban has almost eradicated the poppy fields. No sooner did the war begin and the poppy fields wee reborn.

Children work the poppy fields young as 8 or 9

Narco-Nation Building

By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D

July 7 2009

Hey, guys, don’t pick the poppies.

That’s the order from the Obama Administration to the 4,000 Marines presently engaged in Operation Khanjar or “Strike of the Sword,” an invasion of the Taliban infested Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan.

The Marines of Bravo’s Company 1^st Platoon sleep beside groves of poppies Troops of the 2^nd Platoon walk through the fields on strict orders not to swat the heavy opium bulbs. The Afghan farmers and laborers, who are engaged in scraping the resin from the bulbs, smile and wave at the passing soldiers.

The Helmand province is the world’s largest cultivator of opium poppies – the crop used to make heroin.

Afghanistan grew 93 percent of the world’s poppy crop last year, with Helmand alone responsible for more than half of the opium production in the country, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Heroin, as it turns out, represents the only staple of the Afghan economy. The country manufactures no domestic products for exportation and the rocky terrain yields no cash crops – – except, of course, the poppies.

The poppies fuel the great jihad against the United States and the Western world. More than 3,500 tons of raw opium is gleaned from the poppy crops every year, producing annual revenues for the Taliban and al Qaeda that range from $5 billion to $16 billion.

Destroying the fields could very well put an end to terrorist activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But the Obama Administration remains intent upon protecting the poppies so that the Afghan farmers and local drug lords can reap the benefits of what purports to be a bumper crop.

Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.

Jason Striuszko a journalist embedded with the U.S. Marines in Garmser, reports that many of the leathernecks are scratching their heads at the apparent contradictions — calling in airstrikes and artillery on the elusive Taliban while assuring farmers and drug lords that they will protect the poppies.

“Of course,” Striuszko says, “those fields will be harvested and some money likely used to help fuel the Taliban, and the Marines are thinking, essentially, ‘huh?’”

“It’s kind of weird. We’re coming over here to fight the Taliban. We see this. We know it’s bad. But at the same time we know it’s the only way locals can make money,” said 1st Lt. Adam Lynch, 27, of Barnstable, Mass.

Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration’s top envoy in Afghanistan, says that poppy eradication – for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. anti-drug efforts in the country – has only resulted in driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

The new approach, Holbrooke maintains, will try to wean the farmers of the lucrative cash crop by giving them help to grow other produce, like wheat, corn and pomegranates.

Most of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan operate in the east, where the poppy problem is not as great. But the 2,400-strong 24th Marines, have taken the field in this southern growing region during harvest season.

An expert on Afghanistan’s drug trade, Barnett Rubin, complained that the Marines are being put in such a situation by a “one-dimensional” military policy that fails to integrate political and economic considerations into long-range planning.

“All we hear is, not enough troops, send more troops,” said Rubin, a professor at New York University. “Then you send in troops with no capacity for assistance, no capacity for development, no capacity for aid, no capacity for governance.”

Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover, whose platoon is sleeping beside a poppy crop planted in the interior courtyard of a mud-walled compound, said the Marines’ mission is to get rid of the “bad guys,” and “the locals aren’t the bad guys.”

“Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio,” said Stover, 28, of Marion, Ohio. “When we got here they were asking us if it’s OK to harvest poppy and we said, ‘Yeah, just don’t use an AK-47.’”

Source

U.S. soldiers inspect a cache of opium that was seized at a border police station on the outskirts of Herat,  October 23 2007. Afghan border police in the western Afghan city have seized 644 kilograms of opium. Afghanistan accounts for over 93 percent of the world’s supply of opium, the main ingredient in heroin, a lucrative trade whose proceeds in part fund some of the Taliban-led insurgency.    AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

They don’t tell you about this, about Afghanistan’s growing domestic drug problem – an estimated 1.5 million addicts, including 120,000 women, according to the Ministry of Narcotics – all those advocates of legalizing the country’s robust opium crop – a yield that provides some 93 per cent of the world’s heroin. This heroin, which is refined opium, ends up on streets across the globe but also is destroying families here. Source

They also fail to mention the problem now in Iran , Iraq,
Russia, Europe and North America.

There are millions of new heroin addicts around the world.

Karima leaned to one side and rubbed her temples with half-painted pink fingernails. The smile that was wide and infectious for her visitors had now surrendered to the internal darkness that ruled her addiction.

The day had started like most in her life: With an opium tea that she drinks to “feel happy.” On bad days, she needs it three or four times.

Karima is 13.

She is bright, and confident, but left school during fourth grade. From the two narrow rooms they call home in an otherwise abandoned building, she cannot see a future that is either clean or normal — a hard assessment for a girl who is barely a teenager.

“There is no one but me to support the family and we have nothing to live easily,” she said. “I feel sad most of the time and the tea makes me feel better.”

Her mother, Najiba, raised five children on a steady diet of narcotics to ease their hunger pains and winter chills and her own grief from losing a son. The whole family has been through drug treatment — twice — and Najiba claims to be healthy.

Karima is still addicted. She buys the drugs herself with money from her father and boils the opium tea the way her mother long did for her.

Her wild-eyed youngest sister, Raisa, is three years old and clicks her tongue while fidgeting with a red patent purse. Raisa had opium in her veins before she was born. Najiba cut her off months ago, but Raisa remembers the “dizzy” tea and craves it. I asked her why.

“Because I miss it,” she said in the tiniest voice. “I like it.” Source

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. Source

Opium production is one of the chief sources of revenue for the warlords that occupy the Afghan parliament and is one of the main reasons why the government is seen as corrupt by the Afghan people. As long as NATO continues to bomb civilians in an effort to extend the control of those warlords, the Afghan people will continue to join the resistance to the foreign occupation.

This reality led to the recent resignation of Matthew Hoh, a former US army captain and Foreign Service official in Zabul province. Hoh resigned because he said that the presence of the foreign troops was the main reason why the resistance was growing and he believed that the war needed to end.  Source

They have never connected Bin Laden to 9/11

Bin Laden has been dead since December of 2001

9/11 was just an excuse to go to war in Afghanistan nothing more.

The results of the invasion of Afghanistan is devastating to say the least.

The radiation will have a very devastating impact on Afghans. The testing proved the use of radioactive weapons. Source

The end result will be as it is in Iraq and other countries Nato and the US have invaded.

Doctors report “unprecedented” rise in deformities, cancers in Iraq

Kosovo

Since its dealings with the Meo tribesmen in Laos during the Vietnam era, the CIA has protected narcotics traffic in key locations in order partly to finance its covert operations. The scale of international narcotics traffic today is such that major US banks such as Citigroup are reported to derive a significant share of their profits from laundering the proceeds. Source

CIA Drug  Operations a little history

Bush – Cheney and drugs

Pipelines in the Middle East Afghanistan included/ Maps as well

Drug money used as a geopolitics weapon by CIA-RAW-Mossad

March 12, 2010

By Brig Asif Haroon Raja

US Administration under George Bush senior had formulated New World Order in 1989 in anticipation to assuming world leadership. Among several aspects how to go about harnessing world resources and to micro manage world affairs, Islam was identified as the next threat to US interests after the imminent collapse of communism which by that time was gasping for breath. Afghanistan figured high in US security paradigm. After the Taliban captured power in 1996 and declared Sharia and refused to abide by terms and conditions of US economic tycoons with regard to shipment of oil and gas from Central Asia through Afghanistan, it was circled for invasion in 1997. In August 1998, Osama bin Laden’s camps in Khost province of Afghanistan were struck by cruise missiles. In July 2001, some high US officials declared that Afghanistan would be invaded in October that year. Going by this sequence of events, it becomes evident that neo-cons in connivance with Jews manufactured 9/11 to achieve their global ambitions. Jewish controlled media played a key role in triggering world wide condemnation of 9/11 attacks and in fomenting hatred against Muslims among the non-Muslim world.

9/11 was an excuse to formulate draconian laws and policies of pre-emption and unilateralism. Terrorism became the most sinful and unforgivable offence. Under the buzzword of terrorism, world cooperation was harnessed to fight global war on terror and supposedly free the world from this menace which in their view posed the biggest threat to world security. Freedom movements within Muslim world were converted into terrorism and terrorism became synonymous to Islam. Al-Qaeda was created from nowhere and transformed into a faceless monster that would appear like a ghost in all areas of US interest. Islamic threat was demonized to justify existence of NATO that had lost its rationale and locus standi after end of Cold War and expiry of Warsaw Pact in 1991.

Afghanistan was not invaded to avenge terror attacks allegedly master minded by Afghanistan based Osama bin Laden and those who harbored him. The real intention was to convert Afghanistan into a permanent US military station wherefrom it could promote its strategic interests. These interests included tapping unexplored mineral resources of Central Asia and shipping gas and oil to Europe and USA through Afghanistan and Pakistan; monitoring China and Russia; remaining within turn round distance of Persian Gulf; preventing Iran from going nuclear and affecting a regime change of its choice; subverting and denuclearizing Pakistan; making India the regional policeman; restoring and controlling world largest supply of opium for world heroin markets and to use drugs as a geopolitics weapon against opponents, especially Russia. In pursuit of its multiple objectives Afghanistan was ruthlessly destroyed and till to-date has not been vacated.

CIA has a track record of using drug money to support its covert operations all over the world. It toppled Mossadeq led regime in Iran in 1953. It armed Iraqi Kurds in 1975 to destabilize Iraqi regime. It also used drug money to back Contras movement in Nicaragua in 1980 to bring democracy. Cocaine being the most sought drug became the favorite production of CIA. Unprecedented volume of cocaine trafficking took place in the 1980s but no eyebrow was raised in Washington. Drug money was extensively utilized by CIA to finance Afghan jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan from 1979 till 1989. Commercial production of opium began in 1980s, replacing cocaine with heroin and this new product flooded the US and European markets. By the time Afghan war came to an end, Afghanistan had become the second largest opium producing country. Its production rate had swelled to 1350 metric tons.

When the Taliban under Mullah Omar captured power in 1996, the Islamic regime carried out host of social reforms including imposition of ban on opium production. There was steep decline in this practice for the first time. The Taliban during their rule till October 2001 suffered from worst economic crisis due to severe sanctions imposed by USA and western countries but they never used opium to build their economy. Interestingly, this ban became one of the core reasons for the US to invade Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has now become a narco-state and the largest opium producing country in the world. Younger brother of Hamid Karzai Ahmad Wali Karzai in Kandahar has been the main player exporting heroin to Europe through Turkmenistan. Indian Embassy in Kabul has been working as the coordinating centre for drug trade. Countries like Pakistan and Iran lying in the path of drug trade route are the worst affected since drugs destroy social norms and values as they have in the west. It has made a debilitating impact on societal fabric. By 2008, 8000 metric tons had been exported to world markets. Afghanistan is producing 8250 metric tons per year, which makes 90-92% of world opium supply. Illegal opium production is worth $ 65 billions. Afghan warlords involved are deeply involved in enriching their coffers through drug trade.

While international drug mafia is fully controlled by Zionists, CIA is complicit in global drug trade. Without active support of Pentagon and CIA, it is simply not possible to export opium in thousands of tons. Free licenses are liberally issued to drug producers and traffickers. There are credible reports that US military planes have been made use of and even some coffins were filled with heroin instead of bodies. Truckloads of heroin transfer heroin daily. Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, silenced for years by George W. Bush Administration, testified to the use of NATO planes transporting drugs as well as international terrorists.

Under the pretext of hunting al-Qaeda, CIA has made deep inroads in Pakistan. Drug money is not only used by CIA to finance its illegal operations in Pakistan and elsewhere but also US economy also which because of economic crunch is badly in need of liquidity in its banks that are closing down at an alarming rate. Russia has lashed out at US and NATO for refusing to destroy poppy crops in Afghanistan and not fighting drug production which implies that raw drug sources will remain sacrosanct. The US however puts blame on Taliban for poppy cultivation in Afghanistan for financing insurgency and to snatch this source, it has mounted massive offensive in Helmand, a stronghold of Taliban and major opium growing region.

Under the pretext of hunting al-Qaeda, CIA has made deep inroads in Pakistan. Drug money is not only used by CIA to finance its illegal operations in Pakistan and elsewhere but also US economy also which because of economic crunch is badly in need of liquidity in its banks that are closing down at an alarming rate. Russia has lashed out at US and NATO for refusing to destroy poppy crops in Afghanistan and not fighting drug production which implies that raw drug sources will remain sacrosanct. The US however puts blame on Taliban for poppy cultivation in Afghanistan for financing insurgency and to snatch this source, it has mounted massive offensive in Helmand, a stronghold of Taliban and major opium growing region.

Like the CIA, RAW and Mossad are also heavily involved in narcotic business. Indian drug barons have cultivated close ties with Afghan drug warlords and with Laos which is among the leading drug trading country. India ranks fifth largest illegal opium producing country in the world.  Illicit poppy is being cultivated in large quantity in Himachal Pradesh, Arunchal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Mizoram. India is using profits made out of drug trafficking towards covert operation in Pakistan. Operation aimed at destabilizing Pakistan codenamed CIT X had been jointly conceived by RAW and Mossad for which criminal elements, mercenaries and drug mafia were engaged. 57 training camps were established in East Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Assam, Gujarat, Rajasthan and occupied Kashmir to train and launch terrorists inside Pakistan. Training was imparted to dissident elements from MQM, Jiye Sindh Mahaz, Jiye Sindh Students Federation and Baloch nationalists and other nationalist groups. Source

The so called war on drugs also fuels the US prisons.  The more drugs on the streets the more profit and slaves for prisons.

The Prison Industry in the United States Costs Taxpayers Billions

Just added this November 7 2012

A few facts, new and old.

Afghanistan, Heroin, Addiction, Death

//

Obama’s Afghan War Plans May Run Into Weary Public, Deficits

November 11 2008

Staff Sergeant Brendan Kearns went through urban combat training six months ago with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, preparing for a planned return to Iraq. In January, his brigade is heading to Afghanistan instead.

While Iraq has long dominated headlines, Afghanistan will demand more immediate attention, as President-elect Barack Obama becomes the first commander-in-chief since Richard M. Nixon in 1969 to take charge during wartime.

Intensifying violence is ramping up U.S. involvement, costing money and lives when America faces a record budget deficit and the public is weary of war. Backing off may allow al-Qaeda and the Taliban to return to power.

“The most pressing problem for the next president will be the Afghan-Pakistan conundrum,” says retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, lead author of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

“A resurgent Taliban threatens stability and perhaps survival of the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s a nightmare scenario, and we may have reached a tipping point where the Taliban is winning.”

The Bush administration is reviewing its military and humanitarian strategy in Afghanistan and will offer recommendations to Obama’s transition team before he takes office Jan. 20.

Refocus Attention

On the campaign trail, the Illinois senator vowed to refocus attention there while pulling out most of the 152,000 troops in Iraq within 16 months. That’s becoming increasingly possible as deadly attacks have dropped dramatically since 2007, when President George W. Bush sent 30,000 additional U.S. troops.

The surge — along with the so-called Sunni awakening, in which tribes turned against al-Qaeda and formed U.S.-funded, government-allied militias — is credited with stabilizing the country. The Iraqi and U.S. governments have tentatively agreed on a phased withdrawal of American combat forces by 2011, subject to conditions.

Obama, 47, has said a “responsible drawdown” from Iraq would allow the U.S. to upgrade military equipment, pay for veterans’ care and redirect expenditures — which currently top $10 billion a month — to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaeda leaders are believed to be operating along the porous border with Pakistan.

Funding Decisions

Deciding what the U.S. can afford to spend is complicated by the $700 billion the Treasury is using to rescue the financial system, which may push the federal budget deficit next year to more than $1 trillion, following a record $455 billion this year.

“I know there’s a lot of economic problems in the U.S.,” says Kearns, 40, who’s based at Fort Drum, New York, and has served in both wars. “But the military at this point doesn’t need its budgets cut. With seven years of war, there’s a lot of wear and tear on equipment and personnel.”

Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated, with a reconstituted and emboldened Taliban mounting more attacks on American forces. Neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan — threatened by domestic extremists, assassination attempts and a financial crisis — hasn’t been able to control border security in its autonomous tribal areas where militants take shelter.

General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has asked for 20,000 more American troops next year; the 3,500-person 3rd Brigade Combat Team deploying in January from Fort Drum will be the tip of that spear.

Opium Production

The view of U.S., European and United Nations officials is that more foreign soldiers won’t be enough to save Afghanistan. The country needs a sustained international effort to shrink opium production, build roads and establish basic utilities including running water and electricity. The Afghan government, widely criticized as weak, corrupt and inefficient, needs to better deliver services and secure its territory.

Obama will face a balancing act with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which commands a force in Afghanistan that uses 13,000 of the 31,000 American troops now in the country. European leaders have made clear they aren’t keen on sending more soldiers into a widening war.

Still, there’s no doubt Afghanistan needs better security. In Iraq, there are 800,000 local, U.S. and international forces. In Afghanistan, there are at most 210,000 combined troops, and many of the Afghans lack training and equipment.

Clear, Hold, Build

“Classic counterinsurgency strategy is `Clear, Hold and Build’: You clear enemy forces, you hold the area, generally with the host nation’s security forces, and then you build a better society,” Nagl says. “In Afghanistan we have not had enough forces to hold and have not put proper emphasis on build. We’ve cleared the same towns over and over and over.”

Every time U.S. forces leave a village they have cleared without Afghan soldiers to take their place, “the Taliban comes back and they shoot people who worked with us in the head,” he says. “After the second or third time that happens, there aren’t enough people left to work with us.”

Analysts say the best solution would be to greatly expand the Afghan army, supported by U.S. military advisers, and enlist militias into something like the “Sons of Iraq,” which turned enemy forces into associates.

What worked in Iraq may not work in Afghanistan, however, where the terrain is rougher, the country poorer, corruption more visible and the insurgency more complicated because of hundreds of tribes — many living in autonomous territories along the Pakistan border.

Military Strikes

Obama has consistently said that if Pakistan fails to act against militants on its soil, he would support unilateral military strikes — something the Bush administration has already begun. In the past two months, Pakistan has accused the U.S. of launching 15 missile strikes in the Waziristan tribal area along its Afghan border, and late last month Islamabad lodged a formal protest.

Soldiers at Fort Drum say if they had the ear of the president-elect, they would tell him that while military involvement in Afghanistan is necessary, it isn’t sufficient.

“We need to focus on the basics: infrastructure, food, building roads and security,” says Captain Matthew Burnette, 29, who commands a Howitzer unit headed back to Afghanistan as Obama takes office. “If the three villages you’re working in are happy, they talk to each other, they talk to us, and the Taliban can’t take hold again.”

Source

JALALABAD, Afghanistan

February 15, 2001

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan — once the world’s largest producer — since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation’s largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

“We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,” said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier — a sea of blood-red poppies.

A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world’s supply, U.N. officials said. Opium — the milky substance drained from the poppy plant — is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 1999 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said — more than all other countries combined, including the “Golden Triangle,” where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others — areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.

This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, Frahi said. The rest — about 175,000 acres — was clean.

“We have to look at the situation with careful optimism,” said Sandro Tucci of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.

He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that, as a result, there hasn’t been any production of opium — but that officials would keep checking.

The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would make its own estimate of the poppy crop. Information received so far suggests there will be a decrease, but how much is not yet clear, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We do not think by any stretch of the imagination that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been eliminated. But we, like the rest of the world, welcome positive news.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration declined to comment.

No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of security concerns stemming from the presence of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey was done now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the poppies to have been harvested already.

The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands under Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile, have not traditionally been poppy growing areas and farmers are struggling to raise any crops at all because of severe drought. The rest of the land held by the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where poppies could not grow.

Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in fields where they once grew poppies.

“It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were filled with poppies and this year there is wheat,” he said.

The Taliban enforced the ban by threatening to arrest village elders and mullahs who allowed poppies to be grown. Taliban soldiers patrolled in trucks armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. About 1,000 people in Nangarhar who tried to defy the ban were arrested and jailed until they agreed to destroy their crops.

Signs throughout Nangarhar warn against drug production and use, some calling it an “illicit phenomenon.” Another reads: “Be drug free, be happy.”

Last year, poppies grew on 12,600 acres of land in Nangarhar province. According to the U.N. survey, poppies were planted on only 17 acres there this season and all were destroyed by the Taliban.

“The Taliban have done their work very seriously,” Frahi said.

But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world’s poorest countries, shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.

Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with his three brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the land brought him $1,100.

This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and cattle feed he planted on the entire parcel.

“Life is very bad for me this year,” he said. “Last year I was able to buy meat and wheat and now this year there is nothing.”

But Rehman said he never considered defying the ban.

“The Taliban were patrolling all the time. Of course I was afraid. I did not want to go to jail and lose my freedom and my dignity,” he said, gesturing with dirt-caked hands.

Shams-ul-Haq Sayed, an officer of the Taliban drug control office in Jalalabad, said farmers need international aid.

“This year was the most important for us because growing poppies was part of their culture, and the first years are always the most difficult,” he said.

Tucci said discussions are under way on how to help the farmers.

Western diplomats in Pakistan have suggested the Taliban is simply trying to drive up the price of opium they have stockpiled. The State Department official also said Afghanistan could do more by destroying drug stockpiles and heroin labs and arresting producers and traffickers.

Frahi dismissed that as “nonsense” and said it is drug traffickers and shopkeepers who have stockpiles. Two pounds of opium worth $35 last year are now worth as much as $360, he said.

Mullah Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban’s top drug official in Nangarhar, said the ban would remain regardless of whether the Taliban received aid or international recognition.

“It is our decree that there will be no poppy cultivation. It is banned forever in this country,” he said. “Whether we get assistance or not, poppy growing will never be allowed again in our country.

Source

Caspian Region 1993 The Pipeline Debate

The Caspian Sea shelf is considered one of the largest sources of petroleum outside the Persian Gulf and Russia.

September 18, 2001

US ‘planned attack on Taleban’  In July 2001 well before 9/11

The wider objective was to oust the Taleban

By George Arney A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week’s attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.

Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.

The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place – possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.

Mr Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place. He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.

May 13, 2002,

Afghanistan plans gas pipeline

The pipeline is Afghanistan’s biggest foreign investment project

Afghanistan hopes to strike a deal later this month to build a $2bn pipeline through the country to take gas from energy-rich Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India.

Afghan interim ruler Hamid Karzai is to hold talks with his Pakistani and Turkmenistan counterparts later this month on Afghanistan’s biggest foreign investment project, said Mohammad Alim Razim, minister for Mines and Industries told Reuters.

“The work on the project will start after an agreement is expected to be struck at the coming summit,” Mr Razim said.

The construction of the 850-kilometre pipeline had been previously discussed between Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime, US oil company Unocal and Bridas of Argentina.

The project was abandoned after the US launched missile attacks on Afghanistan in 1999.

US company preferred

Mr Razim said US energy company Unocal was the “lead company” among those that would build the pipeline, which would bring 30bn cubic meters of Turkmen gas to market annually.

Unocal – which led a consortium of companies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Japan and South Korea – has maintained the project is both economically and technically feasible once Afghan stability was secured.

“Unocal is not involved in any projects (including pipelines) in Afghanistan, nor do we have any plans to become involved, nor are we discussing any such projects,” a spokesman told BBC News Online.

The US company formally withdrew from the consortium in 1998.

“The Afghan side assures all sides about the security of the pipeline and will take all responsibilities for it,” Mr Razim said.

Reconstructing

Afghanistan plans to build a road linking Turkmenistan with Pakistan parallel to the pipeline, to supply nearby villages with gas, and also to pump Afghan gas for export, Mr Razim said.

The government would also earn transit fees from the export of gas and oil and hoped to take over ownership of the pipeline after 30 years, he said.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been surveying routes for transferring local gas from northern Afghan areas to Kabul, and to iron ore mines at the Haji Gak pass further west.

“ADB will announce its conclusion soon,” Mr Razim said.

The pipeline is expected to be built with funds from donor countries for the reconstruction of Afghanistan as well as ADB loans, he said.

May 30 2002,

Afghan pipeline given go-ahead

The leaders hope for future oil profits

The leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan have agreed to construct a $2bn pipeline to bring gas from Central Asia to the sub-continent.

The project was abandoned in 1998 when a consortium led by US energy company Unocal withdrew from the project over fears of being seen to support Afghanistan’s then Taliban government. The President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Nayazov, the chairman of Afghanistan’s interim administration Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf signed a memorandum of understanding in Islamabad on Thursday.

President Musharraf said the 1,500km pipeline would run from Turkmenistan’s Daulatabad gas fields to the Pakistani port city of Gwadar.

The Pakistani leader said once the project is completed, Central Asia’s hydrocarbon resources would be available to the international market, including East Asian and other far eastern countries.

Pakistan has plans to build a liquid-gas plant at the Gwadar port for export purposes.

Call for interest

The three countries have agreed to invite international tenders and guarantee funding before launching the project.

Unocal has repeatedly denied it is interested in returning to Afghanistan despite having conducted the original feasibility study to build the pipeline.

There is also a question mark over stability in Afghanistan, but interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said peace was prevailing all over the country.

Afghan officials believe the pipeline could yield significant revenues for the impoverished country in the form of transit fees.

The pipeline could eventually supply gas to India.

President Musharraf also said he was committed to a proposed gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India as it was in his country’s economic interest.

Source

Timeline on Afghanistan