| Ander Nieuws week 48 / Midden-Oosten 2014 | Afghan opium production hits all-time high CounterPunch November 14-16, 2014 Mike Whitney 2014 was a banner year for Afghanistan's booming opium industry. According to a United Nations annual survey released on Wednesday, opium cultivation set a record in 2014, increasing by an impressive 7 percent year-over-year and up nearly 50 percent from 2012. Afghanistan presently produces 80 percent of the world's heroin which provides billions of dollars in illicit profits for the powerful drug Mafia. Heroin trafficking and production have flourished under US military occupation and transformed Afghanistan into a dysfunctional narco-colony. Readers who follow events in Afghanistan will recall that the Taliban had virtually eradicated poppy production before Bush and Cheney launched their war in 2001. The Pentagon reversed that achievement by installing the same bloodthirsty warlords who had been in power before the Taliban. Naturally, this collection of psychopaths - who the western media lauded as the "Northern Alliance" - picked up where they left off and resumed their drug operations boosting their own wealth and power by many orders of magnitude while meeting the near-insatiable demand for heroin in capitals across Europe and America. In a Thursday article in the New York Times, Rod Nordland suggests that the recent uptick in production can be pinned on the Afghan presidential elections. Here's what he says: "The eight-month presidential and provincial elections... affected opium production not only in the increased demand by politicians for campaign cash, but also in diverting police and military resources to the elections and away from opium eradication.Think about how that for a minute. Nordland admits that production rose because of the "the increased demand by politicians for campaign cash", but then he does an about-face and says that those same politicians (like new president Ashraf Ghani) support opium eradication. Does that make sense to you, dear reader? Is Nordland trying to say that Afghan politicians only support eradication when they don't need money, but do a quick 180 when they do? It's worth noting that Washington's new man in Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, received a Master's degree from Columbia University, taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1983 to 1991, and joined the World Bank in 1991. In other words, he has the perfect pedigree for an aspiring sock puppet who will do whatever Washington tells him to do. It's also worth mentioning that Ghani signed a controversial security deal to allow US combat troops to stay in Afghanistan after the occupation formally ends. (US troops will also enjoy total immunity from prosecution.) Karzai refused to cave in on the issue, which made him persona non grata at the White House, but eager-to-please Ashraf signed the document the day after he was sworn into office. Here's the scoop from the Washington Post: "The United States and Afghanistan on Tuesday signed a vital, long-delayed security deal that will allow nearly 10,000 American troops to remain in Afghanistan beyond the final withdrawal of U.S. and international combat forces this year.You can see why they love Ghani in Washington. The man is clearly prepared to bend over backwards to please his handlers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There's no reason to think that Ghani is going to be any tougher on poppy growers or drug traffickers than Karzai. The whole thing is a joke. Besides, Ghani doesn't have the resources to wage that kind of war. He can't deploy combat units to burn the fields, or hunt down and bust the kingpins, or freeze the assets in suspect bank accounts. Only the US has that kind of power, and they're not interested. According to the report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction: "The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts... .Given the severity of the opium problem and its potential to undermine U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, I strongly suggest that your departments consider the trends in opium cultivation and the effectiveness of past counternarcotics efforts when planning future initiatives." (CNN)"Counternarcotics efforts"? What counternarcotics efforts? The US hasn't lifted a finger to fight the ballooning drug trade in 14 years. Show me one headline in the last decade where US agents rolled up even one big-name drug trafficker in Afghanistan? The Washington PR guys don't even bother faking it with photos of captured kilos of heroin stacked a mile high or shady looking gangstas blindfolded and handcuffed doing the perp walk for the media. They don't fake it, because they don't care what the public thinks. In fact, they even shrugged off the UN report. The State Department issued a bland statement saying they were "disappointed", while a spokesman for the Pentagon, Michael Lumpkin, opined, "In our opinion, the failure to reduce poppy cultivation and increase eradication is due to the lack of Afghan government support for the effort." Got that? In other words, blame Karzai. How's that for accountability? So what's going on here? Is the US is really allowing an illicit multi-billion dollar industry to flourish right under its nose (without involvement of any kind) or is there a part of this story that's missing from the headlines? Of course, that leads us to an area of speculation that the media considers taboo, the prospect that US intel agencies are somehow implicated. As journalist and author Alexander Cockburn pointed out some years ago: "There are certain things you aren't meant to say in public in America. ... A prime no-no is to say ... that the CIA's complicity with drug dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947." (Why They Hated Gary Webb, Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch)Is that it? Is that why Afghanistan has emerged as the world's biggest producer of heroin, because the CIA is somehow involved? It seems quite likely, although I suspect it has less to do with greed than it does with policy. After all, the production and trafficking of narcotics helps the US achieve its strategic goals in Afghanistan, that is, to pacify the public, to maintain the loyalty of the warlords, and to open the country to resource extraction and military bases. As long as the warlords get their payola, the US is able to maintain some control over the hinterland beyond Kabul, which is a big part of the gameplan. Now check out this blurb from an article by Alexander Mercouris titled "The Empire of Chaos and the War on Drugs" which gives a brief history of the CIA's involvement in the drug trade: "... during the French war in Indochina, the SDECE (French secret service) ... turned to the French Connection to organise the heroin traffic, partly in order to fund its own operations against the Vietnamese Communists. After the French left, this operation was taken over by the CIA, with opium poppies grown and processed in the area now known as the Golden Triangle by CIA-backed Chinese drug lords associated with the anti-Communist Kuomintang movement, which had ruled China before the 1949 Communist takeover. The extent of collaboration between the US and the drug traffickers was so great that in the 1960s, the CIA was actually arranging flights to ship heroin from southeast Asia to the US.Do you see the pattern here? This isn't about profits. It's about crushing workers movements, leftist organizations, and any emerging grassroots group that threatens the plutocratic system of wealth distribution. To achieve that end, Washington would just as soon climb into bed with jihadis and Neo Nazis as they would with druglords and narco kingpins. In fact, they have! The point is, Afghanistan's bumper crop is not an accident. It's a form of social control that fits with Washington's broader strategic objectives of maintaining a permanent military presence in Central Asia and of opening up the country to resource extraction. The proliferation of drugs helps to keep the "little people" in line so the adults can get on with the business of looting. MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to 'Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion' (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. © CounterPunch Original link | Ander Nieuws week 48 / Midden-Oosten 2014 | |