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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10282009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10282009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">October 28,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Brought to You
by the CIA <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
America's Drug Crisis
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By DAVE
LINDORFF <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">N</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>ext 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.”<br><br>
Kudos to the <i>New York Times</i>, 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.<br><br>
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 <i>in</i>
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
<i>after</i> 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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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 <i>San Jose Mercury</i>
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 <i>Times</i> role here was sordidit and other leading papers,
including the <i>Washington Post</i> and <i>Los Angeles Times</i>did
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
<a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html">
<i>Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press</a></i>) 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.<br><br>
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.
(<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jWM24PqWpJg-935bFXbYANhGJ_lQD9BJLDVO0">
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jWM24PqWpJg-935bFXbYANhGJ_lQD9BJLDVO0</a>
).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Your tax dollars at work.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>Times</i> now reports, by Ahmed Wali
Karzai, the president’s own brother.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military
motto, clearly.<br><br>
The <i>Times</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.<br><br>
Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.<br><br>
<b>Dave Lindorff</b> is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is
“<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031237254X/counterpunchmaga">
The Case for Impeachment</a>” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback). He can be reached at
<a href="mailto:dlindorff@mindspring.com">dlindorff@mindspring.com</a><br>
<br>
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