[News] Afghanistan - America's Drug Crisis Brought to You by the CIA

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10282009.html

October 28, 2009


Brought to You by the CIA


America's Drug Crisis

By DAVE LINDORFF

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb 
in the downtown of your nearest city, or read 
about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just 
imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or 
her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters 
Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, 
for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed 
Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly 
corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug 
lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, 
has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical 
perspective (more on that later), and the dead 
hand of top editors was evident in the overly 
cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which 
stated that “The financial ties and close working 
relationship between the intelligence agency and 
Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about 
America’s war strategy, which is currently under 
review at the White House.”  Well, duh! It should 
be raising questions about why we are even in 
Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at 
the CIA, and about how can the government explain 
this to the over 1000 soldiers and Marines who 
have died supposedly helping to build a new 
Afghanistan).  But that said, the newspaper that 
helped cheerlead us into the pointless and 
criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that 
prevented journalist Risen from running his 
exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration’s 
massive warrantless National Security Agency 
electronic spying operation until after the 2004 
presidential election, this time gave a 
critically important story full play, and even, 
appropriately, included a teaser in the same 
front-page story about October being the most 
deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that 
there is a clear historical pattern here. During 
the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America 
airline front-company, were neck deep in the 
Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was 
Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the 
leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to 
the US, where there was a heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan 
administration, as the late investigative 
journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented 
first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the 
San Jose Mercury newspaper, and later in a book 
by that same name, the CIA was deeply involved in 
the development of and smuggling of cocaine into 
the US, which was soon engulfed in a crack 
cocaine epidemic­one that continues to destroy 
African American and other poor communities 
across the country. (The Times role here was 
sordid­it and other leading papers, including the 
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times­did 
despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly 
trashing his work and his career, and ultimately 
driving him to suicide, though his facts have 
held up. For the whole sordid tale, read Alex 
Cockburn’s and Jeffrey St. Clair’s 
<http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>Whiteout: 
the CIA, Drugs and the Press) In this case, Webb 
showed that the Agency was actually using the 
drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use 
its own planes to ferry down to the Contra forces 
it was backing to subvert the Sandinista 
government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had 
barred the US from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy 
backwater of the world with little connection to 
drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by US 
forces in 2001, had, according to the UN, 
virtually eliminated opium production there), but 
now responsible for as much as 80 percent of the 
world’s opium production­this at a time that the 
US effectively finances and runs the place, with 
an occupying army that, together with Afghan 
government forces that it controls, outnumbers 
the Taliban 12-1 according to a recent AP story. 
(<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jWM24PqWpJg-935bFXbYANhGJ_lQD9BJLDVO0>http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jWM24PqWpJg-935bFXbYANhGJ_lQD9BJLDVO0).

The real story here is that where the US goes, 
the drug trade soon follows, and the leading role 
in developing and nurturing that trade appears to 
be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many 
troops the US should add to its total in 
Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether 
the US should up the ante or scale back to a more 
limited goal of hunting terrorists. It should be 
about how quickly the US can extricate its forces 
from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start 
hearings into corruption and drug pushing by the 
CIA, and how soon the Attorney General’s office 
will impanel a grand jury to probe CIA drug dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, 
blundering and ineffective “War on Drugs” in this 
country, and who mindlessly back “zero-tolerance” 
policies towards drugs in schools and on the job, 
should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward 
drugs and dealing with drug pushers in government 
and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the 
Taliban are being financed by their taxes on 
opium farmers. That may be partly true, but 
recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the 
real story. Taliban forces in Afghanistan, it 
turns out, have been heavily subsidized by 
protection money paid to them by civilian aid 
organizations, including even American 
government-funded aid programs, and even, 
reportedly, by the military forces of some of 
America’s NATO allies (there is currently a 
scandal in Italy concerning such payments by 
Italian forces).  But beyond that, the opium 
industry, far from being controlled by the 
Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled 
by the very warlords with which the US has allied 
itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed 
Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and 
Risen, was a key player in producing hundreds of 
thousands of fraudulent ballots for his brother’s 
election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is 
whether the CIA might have played a role in that 
scam too. In a country where finding printing 
presses is sure to be difficult, and where 
transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is 
risky, you have to wonder whether an agency like 
the CIA, which has ready access to printers and 
to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping 
its assets in control in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when 
you learn that America’s spook agency has been 
keeping not just Karzai, but lots of other 
unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best 
illustrated by an anonymous quote in the Filkins, 
Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a “former CIA 
officer with experience in Afghanistan,” 
explaining the agency’s backing of Karzai, said, 
“Virtually every significant Afghan figure has 
had brushes with the drug trade. If you are 
looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s 
foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to 
Afghanistan’s drug-kingpin presidential brother 
should be the last straw for 
Americans.  President Obama’s “necessary” war in 
Afghanistan is nothing but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding 
into Europe and America thanks to the CIA’s 
active support of the industry and its owners in 
Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to 
our societies than any turbaned terrorists armed 
with suicide bomb vests could hope to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist 
and columnist. His latest book is 
“<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031237254X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 
and now available in paperback). He can be 
reached at <mailto:dlindorff at mindspring.com>dlindorff at mindspring.com




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