Proxy Fight, Part 5

We continue from Part 4, however we detour here into some new material.

Recall, first, that in Part 4 we mentioned neolibs, and towards the end had the following quote:

Cracking the Case: An Interview With Sibel Edmonds by Scott Horton, August 22, 2005

SH: Okay, and you mention when you talk about criminal activity, drug-running, money-laundering, weapons-smuggling...

SE: And these activities overlap. It's not like okay, you have certain criminal entities that are involved in nuclear black market, and then you have certain entities bringing narcotics from the East. You have the same players when you look into these activities at high-levels you come across the same players, they are the same people.

SH: Well, when we're talking about those kind of levels of liquid cash money we probably also have to include major banks too, right?

SE: Financial institutions, yes.

Now we review an article entitled Afghanistan: Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA by Kurt Nimmo, dated May 21, 2006:

"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.

Let me just point out quickly that not everyone fighting against us in Afghanistan is our enemy.

What do I mean by that?

The Afghan peoples are generally fiercely independent. When they are not fighting a foreign invader (which has been seldom in recent decades) the Afghan peoples fight among themselves.

We should be careful not to hold a grudge against those Afghans who fight us; with a little imagination in our foreign policy, many of them would be very good friends.

Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade--in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called "Golden Crescent" (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)--was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban--at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter--are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.

There are connections between the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, on the one hand, and the heroin trade on the other. Undoubtedly, there are corrupt elements in the CIA who make money off drug trafficking. And, the decision to fund the jihad with the profits from the heroin trade was unwise.

However, there are many who seem to think the CIA is the root of all evil in the world -- and, as my readers should all know, the root of all evil in the world is really the Democrats! (HA-ha-ha...!) Seriously, the CIA has a job to do, and those who do that job honorably and well should be appreciated.

"CIA-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.

We first met Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Genesis, Part 5.

From Holy War, Inc. by Peter L. Bergen (ISBN 0-7432-0502-2), pp 68-69:

By simply handing ISI some $3 billion of American taxpayers' money, the CIA also handed the Pakistanis complete control of how the funds were distributed.²² That would turn out to be a rather expensive mistake. By the most conservative estimates, $600 million went to the Hizb party, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist zealot.²³ Hizb was one of seven parties into which leaders of the Afghan resistance had organized themselves. These ranged from Hekmatyar's ultra-Islamist organization to moderate parties that favored the return of the Afghan monarchy. Hekmatyar's party had the dubious distinctions of never winning a significant battle during the war, training a variety of militant Islamists from around the world, killing significant numbers of mujahideen from other parties, and taking a virulently anti-Western line. In addition to hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, Hekmatyar also received the lion's share of aid from the Saudis.²⁴

Considering this guy's effectiveness, I think I can say that the good news is that he has called for his forces to fight alongside of Al Qaeda.

Returning to Afghanistan: Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA:

"Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, (the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism," write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided "not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop," Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush's illegal invasion of the country was well underway. "Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ... The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade." In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.

Again, while certain elements in the CIA are undoubtedly involved, the anti-CIA spin of the author does not bring us too much closer to the truth. From Cracking the Case: An Interview With Sibel Edmonds by Scott Horton, August 22, 2005:

SE: Correct, and I as I said, those lines are so blurry because there are certain countries that we call allies but I wouldn't call them allies, these people are, these countries are, quasi-allies.

SH: Okay, I'm going to go ahead and name some people whom I suspect inside the State Department and the Pentagon, and I suppose you won't be able to answer affirmative or negative on any of these, but I'm very curious when I read about this kind of corruption going on in the State Department, I immediately think of John Bolton and David Wurmser. Do those names mean anything to you?

SE: Well, first of all, I'm not going to answer that question at all, but also you should pay attention to the fact that some of these people have been there for a while, and some of these people had their roots in there even in the mid-1990s.

SH: So more career officials rather than political appointees.

SE: Or maybe a mixture of both.

Back to Afghanistan: Drug Addiction Lucrative for Neolib Banksters, CIA:

Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. "Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world's heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing," notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:

Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year--nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA's Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller's banks.

Before we let the Taliban off too easily as the good guys in the War on Drugs, consider this quote from Holy War, Inc. by Peter L. Bergen (ISBN 0-7432-0502-2), p 143:

Maulvi Hafeezullah, an official in the Taliban's Foreign Ministry, attacked a pile of chocolate doughnuts with gusto. Between mouthfuls of what may be the only Taliban-sanctioned indulgence, he sputtered, "We will never hand over bin Laden. The U.S. has made a monster out of one man. We can unleash a 'heroin bomb' to match your nuclear bomb."

A "heroin bomb"!

Stay tuned for Part 6!

(Mmmm -- chocolate doughnuts!)