Afghanistan Heroin for Europe Protected By Powerful Interests

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SIBEL EDMOND IS KEY HERE.

Drugs for Europe: Protected by Powerful Western Interests, Afghanistan Heroin Transits Through Kosovo

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19581

Global Research, June 7, 2010
The Voice of Russia - 2010-06-05

Two years ago a joke was being circulated on the Runet that a heroin producer has recognized its distributor’s independence. It was about Afghanistan, which was to the first to recognize the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo which had illegally separated from Yugoslavia.

Kosovo has since become a transit point for drugs, channelled from Asia to Europe.

A Serbian military analyst and an authoritative expert on the situation in Kosovo, Milovan Drecun says that, according to the Europol and Interpol, the largest amount of heroin is delivered to Europe from Afghanistan via Kosovo. According to some estimates, some 65% of all the world’s heroin is channeled through the former Serbian province; while 90% of all drugs that reach Europe are shipped via Kosovo.

According to the Canadian detective Stewart Kellock, the Albanian drug mafia operates with the connivance of the United States. Mr. Kellock said in an interview that US diplomats prevent the detention in Kosovo of notorious drug traffickers.

The Canadian detective also confirmed that Kosovo’s current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci leads the biggest Albanian mafia clan.

According to KFOR secret reports, the clan owns three illegal labs to process heroin. People involved in drug smuggling into Kosovo hold state offices of great importance in the province, says the Serbian military analysts Milovan Drecun in a radio interview with the Voice of Russia, and elaborates.

The media talks about the ties that exist between the American military in Kosovo and the local drug dealers, but is it really so?

Officially, the Americans are working hard to stamp out heroin production in Afghanistan, but in reality they, namely the CIA, are using the proceeds from the drug trade, including the illegal drug traffic to Kosovo from Afghanistan which is facilitated mainly via the Bondsteel Base, to replenish their secret coffers, at least that’s what American newspapers have recently been writing about. Milovan Drecun reports.

Other reports mention a U.S. connection with a member of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and a close friend of Kosovo Premier Hashim Taci who are believed to have been smuggling up to 150 kilos of heroin and cocaine at a time. These criminals were chummy with a café owner close to the Bondsteel Base and were doing business with the American officers there, Milovan Drecun adds.

All this means that, with the help of Western patrons, Kosovo has been turned into a breeding ground for all kinds of drug dealers and other criminals. Or, as Alexis Troud from the Paris-based International Academy of Geopolitics famously said, “A criminal zone run by the Albanian mafia”…

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Think tank: Neocons’ influence remains strong under Obama

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0609/tank-neocons-influential-obama-years/

For those who thought the end of the Bush Administration spelled doomsday for the neoconservative movement, think again.

According to a May report (pdf) from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC think tank, neoconservatives associated with prominent figures like former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and pundit Richard Perle are still broadly active, despite policy failures associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Brookings Institution senior fellow Justin Vaisse, author of Neoconservatism: A Biography of a Movement, argues that because neocons never had the degree of influence that opponents credited them with, and also because of a general unawareness of their history, observers don’t fully understand the trajectory of the neoconservative movement that began long before the Iraq invasion and one continues today.

“Neoconservatism remains, to this day, a distinct and very significant voice of the Washington establishment,” Vaisse insists. In May he published the report Why Neoconservativism Still Matters.

Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, says that the most obvious place the neocons are still influential is in U.S. policy toward Iran, where the Obama administration is “continuing the Bush administration’s basic approach, albeit with a ‘kinder, gentler’ face.”

Walt’s assessment squares with a number of recent op-eds in the pages of the Wall Street Journal by Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky, Douglas Feith and Danielle Pletka, the latter of whom also testified on Iran before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs earlier this month.

Walt calls attention to two major reports produced by the Bipartisan Policy Center on Iran, where neoconservative Michael Makovsky was staff director for the studies and Dennis Ross -- whose role “in the administration remains something of a mystery," according to Walt -- was directly involved. The studies, Walt says, “are quite hawkish” and promote the use of force against Iran if diplomacy doesn’t work. Walt also points out that Ross has argued that diplomacy is necessary in part to win international support for military action later.

Following the neocon lead, says Walt, the Obama administration’s insistence “that Iran give up its enrichment capability is simply a non-starter, and keeps us on the same road as Bush’s policy did."

Benjamin Balint, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right, says that even despite their overly rosy predictions surrounding Iraq, neoconservatives have remained steadfast.

They've offered “not a heart-searching mea culpa, not a re-examination of first principles, but very nearly the opposite,” Balint says.

In part, Brooking's Vaisse suggests, the continued influence of the neocons has to do with the organizing principles of the movement and the persistent concerns of U.S. foreign policymakers even under the Obama administration.

Among issues of importance during the Bush administration that have not subsided in the Obama years include: the role the U.S. plays in the world; the U.S. as the sole superpower; a tendency toward unilateralism (whether intentional or by default); the question of militarism; and the exportation of democracy. These issues provide an opening for neocons to assert their leverage.

The three generations of currently-operating neoconservatives show “their substantial presence and political dynamism in Washington,” making it “difficult to imagine that they will not play a significant role in the future of American foreign policy,” according to Vaisse.

Numerous prominent neocons still active

The report indicates that there is still an active and influential older generation of neoconservatives, such as Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and James Woolsey. The middle generation includes The Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar Robert Kagan, New York Times columnist David Brooks and AEI scholars Danielle Pletka, and Tom Donnelly. Former AEI scholar David Frum is also counted among their ranks.

Vaisse says that there is also a younger group in their 40s, 30s and 20s “whose formative experience is not the Cold War, but the 1990s and, more to the point, 9/11 and the Bush administration’s response.” They include Max Boot, Dan Senor, Jamie Fly, Rachel Hoff, Abe Greenwald and Daniel Halper.

“In this sense, neoconservatism is regenerating itself and keeping a balanced age pyramid,” writes Vaisse. “After all, its idealistic, moralistic and patriotic appeal may be better suited to attract young thinkers than the prudent and reasonable calculations of realism.”

But Vaisse argues that it’s not just the individuals who make the neoconservative movement. Just as important -- perhaps more so -- are the “institutions that support them and the publications that relay their views and shape the public debate,” and Vaisse offers the assessment that in this respect, “neoconservatives are well positioned.”

Citing the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, Project for a New American Century, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard, Vaisse writes “These younger neoconservatives have generally received their first internships and jobs, and published their first articles in the old network of friendly think tanks and publications built by the older generation of neoconservatives.”

One of the more recent and robust institutions, according to the report, is the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), created in the spring of 2009. Operating under the direction of Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Dan Senor, FPI is “animated by young operatives” and according to Vaisse “is already making its mark on the Afghanistan and human rights debates, notably by sending public letters signed by neocons and non-neocons alike,” a technique that is a hallmark of neocon action.

Financial support for these institutions, which comes from various conservative donors and foundations, such as the Scaife family, Bradley, Earhart, Castle Rock, and Smith Richardson foundations, “shows no sign of abating,” according to Vaisse.

Sustained financial, institutional and publication support has provided the platform necessary for neoconservatives to have influence long after they were broadly thought to have been run out of the White House.

The report refers to the 2007 Iraq troop surge as a specific, significant, recent development where neocons have had tremendous influence. It was partly devised by Fred Kagan, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is also an influential voice on the current counterinsurgency debates. He was, for example, part of the team of civilian experts who advised General McChrystal on his Afghanistan review in July 2009.

Perhaps more important than the institutions and financial support is the modus operandi of the neoconservatives, according to Janine Wedel, professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of Shadow Elite. In particular, a small subset of neocons, a “neocon core,” has been working together for more than 30 years “to remake American foreign policy according to their own vision.”

According to Wedel, this is done through the neocons' creation of alternative versions of official information and their ability to market those accounts as the more credible ones to audiences in the media, government and other political circles.

The neocons are able to achieve their goals, according to Wedel, “by undermining the rules and standard processes of the government they supposedly serve and supplanting them with their own, all the while making public decisions backed by the power and resources of the state.” Because their undermining of these processes often goes undetected, it is likely many remain in place under the Obama administration.

While the report points out that Obama’s foreign policy team is composed of liberals and realists “whose positions are far from the neocons,” Vaisse also recognizes that “opposition is not total.” On occasion, neoconservatives coordinate with liberal groups on human rights issues, or engage in conversations with senior administration officials, but they “lined up behind the administration” on the war effort in Afghanistan -- this time against the liberal left and some realists in both parties, according to the report.

Earlier this month, when Egypt announced it was renewing its long-standing emergency law, which has been used as the basis for many of its human rights violations, a letter was sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by the Carnegie Endowment’s Working Group on Egypt. This group was composed of think tank scholars of various colors but was heavily populated with neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan and Ellen Bork. The letter called on Clinton to use U.S. leverage as Egypt’s major donor to “encourage them along a path toward reform.” The same day, the State Department released a statement from Secretary Clinton echoing the letter's sentiments.

Vaisse also points out that just as important as the neocons' persistence and coordination with non-neocons is the fact that American foreign policy is cyclical and that frustration with the Obama administration’s “realist and pragmatic” approach will “inevitably create a more congenial environment for the neocons.”

Allen McDuffee is a New York-based journalist and has recently launched a blog called Think Tanked.

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WHAT OUR CHILDREN ARE DYING FOR IN AFGHANISTAN

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/dyinginafghanistan.php

http://i48.tinypic.com/2njvtpf.jpg


Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by C.I.A.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1

Ahmad Wali Karzai, Brother Of Afghan President, Says UN Should Not Leave South
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/ahmad-wali-karzai-brother_n_553088.html

Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

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http://www.infowars.com/ny-times-afghan-opium-kingpin-on-cia-payroll/

“The agency pays (Ahmed Wali) Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home,” reports the Times.

Before the invasion, the Taliban collaborated closely with the U.N. to reduce opium production down to just 185 tonnes, a figure at least 2000% below current levels. The notion that the “Taliban benefits from the drug trade” and that the U.S. is trying to stop it, as both Bush and Obama claimed, is the complete opposite of what is actually happening.



Don't Forget Yugoslavia! Bush AND Clinton need to be tried for warcrimes!

Excellent thread full of links.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=81241.msg460973



Resignation Letter by Senior civilian official in Afghanistan: Matthew P. Hoh

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf

On page 2 he lists his primary reasons for resigning:

The Afghan governments failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legioin and metastatic:

"Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;

"A President whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;"

"A system of prvincial and distrct leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and strongmen allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and whose own political and ecnomic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation; and"

"The recent election process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which has created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government's military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government."

His 4 page letter is worth the read.



Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8180



Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration
By Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His book, Fueling America's War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection is in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield. He wrote this article for the Asia Pacific Journal.

http://hnn.us/articles/125230.html

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Reports link Karzai's brother to heroin trade
By James Risen

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/world/asia/04iht-05afghan.16689186.html

WASHINGTON — When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

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Afghan heroin & the CIA
Andrew G. Marshall - Apr 01, 08
http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/index.php/afghan-heroin-the-cia

GeopoliticalMonitor.com
April 1, 2008

Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban
3. Anglo-American Involvement in the Afghan Opium Trade
4. The British and the Taliban
5. Who Profits from the Drug Trade?
6. Endnotes

1. Executive Summary

This report is about American and British involvement in the Afghan drug trade in opium, focusing on the history of such involvement, and the nature of the drug trade since the 2001 occupation of Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan supplies “more than 90 per cent of the world's illicit opium, from which heroin is made,”[1] so who’s profiting from the trade?

2. The Anglo-Americans and the Origins of the Taliban

The CIA Creates Al-Qaeda

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, said in an interview with a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war did not begin in the 1980s, butHeroin that, “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which precipitated the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan.[2] From the Soviet invasion, a bloody ten-year war followed.

Amazingly, “Before 1979 Pakistan and Afghanistan exported very little heroin to the West,”[3] but by 1981, “trucks from the Pakistan army’s National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin – protected by ISI [Pakistan’s internal security service] papers freeing them from police search.”[4] This change occurred in 1981 when then CIA Director William Casey, Prince Turki bin Faisal of Saudi intelligence and the ISI worked together to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992 in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6. The SAS [British special forces] trained future Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts" while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia.[5] Further, “CIA aid was funneled through [Pakistani President] General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[6]

[b]Creating the Taliban

In the mid-1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[7] During that same time the Taliban acquired contacts with the ISI,[8] often referred to as Pakistan’s “shadow government.” In 1995, the ISI was actively aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan’s civil war against the warlords that controlled the country.[9] In addition, just as in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the previous decade, the ISI looked to Saudi intelligence to provide the funding for the Taliban, and the ties between the ISI and Saudi intelligence grew much closer.[10] The Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan was also aided by the CIA, which worked with the Pakistani ISI.[11]

A few years after the Taliban came to power they began a campaign to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crops, and “The success of Afghanistan’s 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban government was recognized by the United Nations” as a monumental feat, in that “no other country was able to implement a comparable program.”[12] In October of 2001, the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.[13]

In June of 2001, a few months before 9/11, it was reported that a “recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan” was announced “by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, [which] made the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban.”[14]

3. Anglo-American Involvement in the Afghan Opium Trade

The World’s #1 Narco-State

Drug trafficking is the largest global commodity in profits after the oil and arms trade, consequently, “immediately following the October 2001 invasion opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.”[15] The Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan successfully restored the drug trade. The Guardian recently reported that, “In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.”[16]

The British

In 2005 it was reported by the Independent that Afghanistan’s Interior Minister had resigned, “amid reports he had quit because of the involvement of senior government officials in the illegal drug trade.” He had "been outspoken over the involvement of officials in the drug trade and is believed to have had differences with President Karzai over the appointment of Provincial officials.”[17] In 2006, the Independent reported that, “British intelligence officers and military commanders accused the US of undermining British policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the sacking of a key British ally in the Afghan province of Helmand.” The British “blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai's decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor of Helmand.” Mr. Daud “had survived several Taliban assassination attempts, was seen as a key player in Britain's anti-drugs campaign in Helmand,” and was fired after Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, “listened to advice from ‘other powerful Western players’.”[18]

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in a 2007 article in the UK Daily Mail, that what has been achieved in Afghanistan is “the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.”[19] Murray elaborated that, “Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.” This means that Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with NATO troops.” Murray explains that this was able to happen because “the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government.” Murray stated that, “Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.”[20]

The Americans

In 2002, former Additional Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India wrote that, in regard to the failure to combat the rise in opium production, “this marked lack of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda.”[21]

The Hindu reported in 2008 that, “90 per cent of the heroin sold in Russia comes from Afghanistan,” and Putin was quoted as saying, “Unfortunately, they (NATO) are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” and that the coalition forces were “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” The article then reported that, “according to unconfirmed reports the U.S. military transport aviation is used for the delivery of drugs from Afghanistan to the American airbases, Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey,” and that, “It has been reported earlier that the CIA is involved in Afghanistan’s opium production, or is at least protecting it.” One Russian journalist quoted anonymous Afghan officials as saying, “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”[22]

4. The British and the Taliban

Training the Taliban

The Independent reported in 2008 that “Britain planned to build a Taliban training camp for 2,000 fighters in southern Afghanistan, as part of a top-secret deal to make them swap sides. The plans were discovered on a memory stick seized by Afghan secret police in December.” Further, “The camp would provide military training for 1,800 ordinary Taliban fighters and 200 low-level commanders.”[23]

The article explained that, “the Afghans feared the British were training a militia with no loyalty to the central government. Intercepted Taliban communications suggested they thought the British were trying to help them.” The article further reported that, the program was bankrolled by the British,” and that, “the memory stick revealed that $125,000 (£64,000) had been spent on preparing the camp and a further $200,000 was earmarked to run it in 2008,” which “sparked allegations that British agents were paying the Taliban.” Further, “the Afghan government took issue with plans to provide military training to turn the insurgents into a defence force.” On top of that, “the memory stick revealed plans to train the Taliban to use secure satellite phones, so they could communicate directly with UK officials.” “Officially, the British embassy remains tight-lipped, fuelling speculation that the plan may have been part of a wider clandestine operation.”[24]

5. Who Profits from the Drug Trade?

Wall Street and Big Banks

Michel Chossudovsky describes the heroin trade as a “hierarchy of prices,” with the drug’s street price, (what it is sold for in largely Western cities around the world), is 80 to 100 times the price paid to the farmers who cultivate it in Afghanistan.[25] The IMF reported that in the late 1990s, money laundering accounted for 2-5% of the world’s GDP, and that a large percentage of the 590 billion to 1.5 trillion dollars in annual money laundering is “directly linked to the trade in narcotics.” This lucrative trade in narcotics produces profits which are “laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe.” These offshore havens “are controlled by major Western banks and financial institutions” which “have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade.”[26]

An example of the interest of Wall Street and London bankers in the international drug trade, we can look to Columbia and the FARC rebel group. In “1999, NYSE [New York Stock Exchange] Chairman Dick Grasso traveled to Columbia and met with the leader of the FARC rebels controlling the southern third of the country.” “Grasso had asked the Columbian rebels to invest their profits in Wall Street.”[27] The Associated Press reported that Grasso told the rebel leader to, “make peace and expect great economic benefits from global investors,” and invited the rebel leader to visit Wall Street.[28] To allow for drug investment in Western financial institutions, “major banks like Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase all offer private client services for the very wealthy with very few questions asked.”[29]

6. Endnotes

[1] Stephen Fidler, UN alarm at spread of Afghan opium. Financial Times: March 4, 2008: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto030420081933091960

[2] Bill Blum (translator). The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan. Global Research: October 15, 2001: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

[3-4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of North America. University of California Press: 2007, page 124

[5] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 122-23

[6] Peter Dale Scott, Ibid, page 123

[7] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328

[8] Steve Coll, Ibid, page 293

[9] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 293-294

[10] Steve Coll, Ibid, pages 295-296

[11] Times of India, CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban. Times of India Online: March 7, 2001: http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm

[12] Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, 2nd ed. Center for Research on Globalization: Québec, 2005: Page 226

[13] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 227

[14] Robert Scheer, Bush's Faustian Deal With the Taliban. The Nation: June 4, 2001: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010604/20010522

[15] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 228

[16] Patrick Wintour, Opium economy will take 20 years and £1bn to remove. The Guardian: February 6, 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/06/afghanistan.politics

[17] Justin Huggler, Afghan minister quits over opium trade. The Independent: September 28, 2005: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghan
-minister-quits-over-opium-trade-508664.html

[18] Robert Fox, CIA is undermining British war effort, say military chiefs. The Independent: December 10, 2006: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/cia-is-undermining-

british-war-effort-say-military-chiefs-427848.html

[19-20] Craig Murray, Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time. UK Daily Mail: July 21, 2007: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_

id=469983&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true

[21] B. Raman, Assassination of Jaki Abdul Qadeer in Kabul. South Asia Analysis Group: Paper no. 489, August 7, 2002: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers5/paper489.html

[22] Vladimir Radyuhin, Russia: victim of narco-aggression. The Hindu: February 4, 2008: http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/04/stories/2008020453271000.htm

[23-24] Jerome Starkey, Revealed: British plan to build training camp for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The Independent: February 4, 2008: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/revealed-british-plan-to-build
-training-camp-for-taliban-fighters-in-afghanistan-777671.html

[25] Michel Chossudovsky, Op cit, page 230

[26] Michel Chossudovsky, Ibid, page 233

[27] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New Society Publishers: Canada, 2004: Page 57

[28] CBS MarketWatch, NYSE's Grasso met with Colombia's FARC. AP: June 29, 1999: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/-nyses-grasso-met-colombias/

story.aspx?guid=%7B571A6F96-E694-4D58-A7A9-F5DBFF132F4A%7D

[29] Michael C. Ruppert, Op cit, page 61

[keehah]

Afghanistan: Karzai brother “killed by bodyguard” 12/07/11 (http://www.euronews.net/2011/07/12/karzai-brother-killed-by-bodyguard/)

The younger brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been killed in his own home.

Ahmad Wali Karzai was considered to be one of the most powerful men in southern Afghanistan but was a controversial figure, accused of involvement in the drug trade.

A spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province – where Ahmad Wali Karzai lived and was head of the provincial council – said he was killed inside his house, reportedly by one of his bodyguards.

[keehah]

Bomber Attacks Memorial Service for Karzai's Half Brother (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/07/bomber-attacks-funeral-karzais-half-brother/39959/)

A suicide bomber hiding explosives in his turban blew himself up today when he was stopped by guards outside a memorial service for Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in Kandahar. The attack, which killed four people including the head of Kandahar's religious council and a child, came only a day after a grief-stricken Karzai buried Wali Karzao, who was assassinated by his bodyguard on Tuesday. Karzai himself wasn't present at the mosque, but four of his brothers and other influential Afghan figures were in attendance, according to the BBC. No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. "There was a prayer going on and after that prayer, the man came close to the director of the religious council and exploded," Kandahar governor Toryalai Wesa told the AP. The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/asia/14kabul.html?_r=2) notes today that President Karzai's loss goes beyond personal grief. "Without his brother, who gave the president the assurance that he could count on the political and economic backing of at least a quarter of the country-- the south--Mr. Karzai's government appears increasingly adrift," the paper writes.

[mrnhtbr2232]

Bumped for recommend reading. Most people cannot wrap their heads around the profits and motivations behind industrial scale heroin production from Afghanistan, or why U.S. troops are in harm's way protecting criminal syndicates. Some good stuff here worth revisitng IMO.

[DMac]

Good posts in this thread. I am continually amazed how ignorant folks are of the importance of the global heroin trade.

[JDRock]

the official propaganda for the original gulf invasion ; " we must keep the free flow of oil at market prices"

the REAL reason for the afghan war?? the free flow of heroin at mkt prices to kill off and weaken the hated white anglo.