All You Need To Know About Afghanistan
. . . that you haven't heard on the evening news. It turns out one cannot understand Afghanistan's recent history without considering the role the "illicit" poppy crop and heroin labs have played in the last 30 years:
Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets. . . .
Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a ten-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.
This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally. . . .
Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.
Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.*
(Emphasis mine.)
That was then, what about now? It's worse:
Afghanistan had a record harvest of 8,200 tons of opium in 2007, a 34 per cent increase in production over 2006. The total opium export is valued at US dollars 4 billion in Afghanistan, an increase of 29 per cent over 2006. The opium economy is now equivalent to more than half (53 per cent) of the country's licit gross domestic product (GDP). (Again, emphasis mine.)
So, why don't "we" do anything? Sadly, we -- through our covert intelligence agency the CIA -- started this, and intend to keep it going. After all, President Hamid Karzai's brother is on the payroll:
KABUL, Afghanistan - 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. . . .
The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
And even if we wanted to "develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw", there's the little matter of cash. Remember, that white powder is right now probably helping our banking system a great deal:
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
We has a country are now hooked on heroin not literally but economically. That is not an infusion one kicks cold turkey, especially since so many of our more traditional assets are tanking in value.
Expect the war in Afghanistan to continue.
*Those doubtful of the allegations raised in that excerpt should look into the author's work. The CIA tried to quash his first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, but it was too well researched to be simply swept under the rug. I tried to get a copy from our city library system, but, alas, it is kept as a research text, meaning it cannot be checked out. That was probably done to prevent the spooks from "losing" the library's copies. You can hear an interview with the author here.
Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets. . . .
Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a ten-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.
This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally. . . .
Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.
Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.*
(Emphasis mine.)
That was then, what about now? It's worse:
Afghanistan had a record harvest of 8,200 tons of opium in 2007, a 34 per cent increase in production over 2006. The total opium export is valued at US dollars 4 billion in Afghanistan, an increase of 29 per cent over 2006. The opium economy is now equivalent to more than half (53 per cent) of the country's licit gross domestic product (GDP). (Again, emphasis mine.)
So, why don't "we" do anything? Sadly, we -- through our covert intelligence agency the CIA -- started this, and intend to keep it going. After all, President Hamid Karzai's brother is on the payroll:
KABUL, Afghanistan - 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. . . .
The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
And even if we wanted to "develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw", there's the little matter of cash. Remember, that white powder is right now probably helping our banking system a great deal:
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
We has a country are now hooked on heroin not literally but economically. That is not an infusion one kicks cold turkey, especially since so many of our more traditional assets are tanking in value.
Expect the war in Afghanistan to continue.
*Those doubtful of the allegations raised in that excerpt should look into the author's work. The CIA tried to quash his first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, but it was too well researched to be simply swept under the rug. I tried to get a copy from our city library system, but, alas, it is kept as a research text, meaning it cannot be checked out. That was probably done to prevent the spooks from "losing" the library's copies. You can hear an interview with the author here.