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Posted on 03/18/2010 6:50:49 PM PDT by jazusamo
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan -- This forward operating base, "20 miles from nowhere," may be the fastest-growing military installation in the world. In the six months since our Fox News team was previously here, the base and its "population" have almost doubled in size. As one of our hosts put it shortly after we arrived, "it's growing faster than opium poppies." But then again, opium is one of the reasons this place is expanding so rapidly.
If the long war here in the shadows of the Hindu Kush is going to be won, it will have to be won here in southern Afghanistan first. This forbidding terrain along the Helmand River basin is both the "spiritual heartland" of the Taliban movement and the primary source of opium, which fuels their insurgency.
Southern Afghanistan is where the Taliban movement began -- and nearly ended. Spawned with the help of Pakistan's government in the 1980s to help defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the faction initially was financed by oil-rich Islamists in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. By 1996, the Taliban, victors in a bloody half-decade-long civil war, had established a brutal, repressive theocracy in Kabul. Taliban leader Mullah Omar became a patron and protector of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida was granted near autonomy to establish bases for indoctrinating and training "holy warriors."
The 9/11 attacks changed everything for the Taliban. In less than three months, a hastily assembled U.S.-supported coalition dubbed the "Northern Alliance" forced the Taliban out of Kabul, and remnants of the regime fled south and east toward mountain redoubts and refuges in Pakistan. Kandahar, the last city in Afghanistan held by the Taliban, fell to coalition troops on the 60th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Driven underground, Taliban leaders found it increasingly difficult to finance their cause. As international pressure and aggressive monetary tracking dried up much of their foreign support, insurgent leaders turned to revenues from opium to sustain their movement.
Shutting down Taliban-controlled opium poppy cultivation, processing laboratories, caches, "delivery services" and money laundering operations has become a crucial mission for the U.S.-led coalition. According to the United Nations, more than 90 percent of the world's illicit opium, heroin and morphine base originates here in southern Afghanistan -- primarily in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. Refined "product," estimated to be worth more than $3 billion, is then moved via "ratlines" through neighboring countries to consumers in Europe, Russia, Iran and the United States.
According to intelligence officers here, the Taliban have become a "narco-insurgency" that nets hundreds of millions of dollars from the global opium trade. Taliban networks use the money to finance the purchase of weapons and munitions and to buy protection from corrupt officials here in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan.
Officers in the Marine expeditionary brigade headquartered here at Camp Leatherneck describe the dual tasks of conducting counterinsurgency operations to protect the civilian population and interrupting this financial flow to the Taliban as "formidable" yet "essential" to victory. To that end, these Marines and units of the newly reorganized Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan are working closely with special agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration to target drug labs, "storage depots" and key individuals involved in the opium trade.
Last month, one of the prime objectives of Operation Moshtarak in the opium-rich Marjah district of Helmand province was taking down local narco-networks. Though Taliban fighters pledged to repel the "foreign invaders," they proved unable to prevent NATO and Afghan government troops from reasserting control over the region.
Now Taliban leaders are promising to prevent coalition forces from wresting control over the city of Kandahar. Over the course of the four days we have been "in country" this time, coordinated attacks by suicide bombers have increased dramatically, causing more than 50 civilian dead and wounded. Taliban propaganda organs blame "the American and European trespassers" for the casualties. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has responded by promising to dispatch more than 1,000 additional Afghan police to the region.
Keeping this commitment is a major challenge. DEA, military and contract civilian trainers and mentors acknowledge that fielding a "qualified and capable Afghan security force" is essential to winning the fight here in "opium central." But privately, they wonder whether they can train and equip adequate numbers by next summer, when the Obama administration has promised to start withdrawing American troops.
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Afghanistan is a vast place. I don’t think they’ll ever clean up all the poppy patches unless it’s with a nuke.
Yep, and I doubt many Afghanis want to, it’s a large part of their economy.
Thanks for the ping jaz.
Sincerely, nuke the poppies.
Lets the farmers grow opium, buy it, then use it to make everyone feel good about obamacare.
Better yet, ship it to Africa where they need pain killers.
Heroin’s already taking a terrible toll on the Afghans as it is. I’ve read some gruesome stories about whole villages where everyone from the grandmas to the kids are junkies.
Eventually they all “get high on their own supply”.
Then he will be too busy to attend to Maryam D'Abo...
Cheers!
From what I’ve read, the vast majority of the stuff is indeed grown in Helmand and Kandahar, and not in remote, isolated patches either, but rather vast fields, impossible to miss.
I also read a great article last year in the NYT by a former anti-poppy official that defoliants nowadays could take them out without poisoning people or permanently harming the soil.
Just this little matter of ol’ Pashmina Boy relying on them for his principal political base.
NY Times: Afghan Opium Kingpin On CIA Payroll
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But exposé serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to mention decades-long U.S. agenda to support lucrative Golden Crescent drug trade
Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
A bombshell article in today's edition of the New York Times lifts the lid on how the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a suspected kingpin of the country's booming opium trade, has been on the CIA payroll for the past eight years. However, the article serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to address the fact that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the agenda to reinstate the Golden Crescent drug trade.
"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.
An October 2008 report from the Times reveals how, after security forces discovered a huge tractor-trailer full of heroin outside Kandahar in 2004, "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."
In 2006, following the discovery of another cache of heroin, "United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai."
The Times article out today also discusses how the CIA uses Karzai as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban. He is also directly implicated in the manufacturing of phony ballots and polling stations that were attributed to the President's disputed election victory.
“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”
Officials quoted by The Times described Karzai as a Mafia-like figure who expanded his influence over the drug trade with the aid of U.S. efforts to eliminate his competitors.
The Afghan opium trade has exploded since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, following a lull after the Taliban had imposed a crackdown. According to the U.N., the drug trade is now worth $65 billion. Afghanistan produces 92 per cent of the world's opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year. Other figures put the number far higher, at around 6,100 tonnes a year.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
see #11.
REBRANDING THE LONG WAR, Part 1
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May 8, 2009
Page 1 of 2
REBRANDING THE LONG WAR, Part 1
Obama does his Bush impression
By Pepe Escobar
The "lasting commitment" Washington war-time summit/photo-op between United States President Barack Obama and the AfPak twins, "Af" President Hamid Karzai and "Pak" President Asif Ali Zardari was far from being an urgent meeting to discuss ways to prevent the end of civilization as we know it. It has been all about the meticulous rebranding of the Pentagon's "Long War".
In Obama's own words, the "lasting commitment" is above all to "defeat al-Qaeda". As an afterthought, the president added, "But also to support the democratically elected, sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan." To have George W Bush's man in Kabul and former premier Benazir Bhutto's widow defined as "sovereign", one would be excused for believing Bush is still in the White House.
In yet another deployment of his impeccable democratic credentials, Karzai has just picked as one of his vice presidential running mates none other than former Jamiat-e-Islami top commander and former first vice president Mohammad Fahim, a suspected drug warlord and armed militia-friendly veteran whom Human Rights Watch deplores as a systematic human-rights abuser. Faheem is Tajik; Karzai is Pashtun (from a minor tribe). Karzai badly needs the Tajiks to win a second presidential term in August.
Possibly moved by the obligatory "deep regret" expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai refrained from throwing a tantrum in Washington concerning the latest "precise" US air strike in ultra-remote Farah province in western Afghanistan which, according to local sources, may have incinerated over 100 Afghans, 70% of them women and children. Context is key: it was the inept, corrupt, dysfunctional Karzai administration - monopolized by warlords and bandits - which made so much easier the return of the Taliban in full force.
Obama's opium war
By now it's clear that the upcoming, Pentagon-enabled, summer surge in the "Af" section of Obama's war in AfPak will be deployed essentially as Obama's new opium war. In a spicy historic reversal, the British Empire (which practically annexed Afghanistan) wanted the Chinese to be hooked on its opium, while now the American empire wants Afghans to stop cultivating it.
The strategy boils down to devastating the Pashtun-cultivated poppy fields in southern Helmand province - the opium capital of the world. In practice, this will be yet another indiscriminate war against Pashtun peasants, who have been cultivating poppies for centuries. Needless to say, thousands will migrate to the anti-occupation rainbow coalition/motley crew branded as "Taliban".
Destroying the only source of income for scores of poor Afghans means, in Pentagon spin, "to cut off the Taliban's main source of money", which also happens to be the "main source of money" for a collection of wily, US-friendly warlords who will not resign themselves to being left blowing in the wind.
The strategy is also oblivious to the fact that the Taliban themselves receive scores of funding from pious Gulf petro-monarchy millionaires as well as from sections in Saudi Arabia - the same Saudi Arabia that Pentagon supremo Robert Gates is now actively courting to ... abandon the Taliban. Since the Obama inauguration in January, Washington's heavy pressure over Islamabad has been relentless: forget about your enemy India, we want you to fight "our" war against the Taliban and "al-Qaeda".
Thus, expect any Pashtun opium farmer or peasant who brandishes his ax, dagger, matchlock or rusty Lee-Enfield rifle at the ultra-high tech incoming US troops to be branded a "terrorist". Welcome to yet one more chapter of the indeed long Pentagon war against the world's poorest.
You're finished because I said so
As for the "Pak" component of AfPak, it is pure counter-insurgency (COIN). As such, His Master's Voice has got to be Central Command commander and surging General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus.
Enter the Pentagon's relentless PR campaign. Last week, Gates warned the US Senate Appropriations Committee that without the approval of a US$400 million-worth Pakistan Counter-insurgency Capability Fund (itself part of a humongous, extra $83.5 billion Obama wants to continue prosecuting his wars), and under the "unique authority" of Petraeus, the Pakistani government itself could collapse. The State Department was in tune: Clinton said Pakistan might collapse within six months.
Anyone is excused for believing this tactic - just gimme the money and shut up - is still Bush "war on terror" territory; that's because it is (the same extraordinary powers, with the State Department duly bypassed, just as with the Bush administration). The final song, of course, remains the same: the Pentagon running the show, very tight with the Pakistani army.
For US domestic consumption purposes, Pentagon tactics are a mix of obfuscation and paranoia. For instance, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell says, about Pakistan, "This is not a war zone for the US military." But then Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - who's been to Pakistan twice in the past three weeks - says the Taliban in AfPak overall "threaten our national interests in the region and our safety here at home".
He was echoing both Clinton and Gates, who had said that the Taliban are an "existential threat" to Pakistan. Finally, Petraeus closes the scare tactics circle - stressing in a letter to the House Armed Services Committee that if the Pakistani Army does not prevail over the Taliban in two weeks, the Pakistani government may collapse.
That unveils the core of Pentagon's and David "COIN" Petraeus' thinking: they know that for long-term US designs what's best is yet another military dictatorship. Zardari's government is - rightfully - considered a sham (as Washington starts courting another dubious quantity, former premier Nawaz Sharif). Petraeus' "superior" man (his own word) couldn't be anyone but Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kiani.
And that's exactly how Obama put it in his 100-day press conference last week, stressing the "strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation" and reducing Zardari to smithereens ("very fragile" government, lacking "the capacity to deliver basic services" and without "the support and the loyalty of their people"). Judging by his body language, Obama must have repeated the same litany to Zardari yesterday, live in Washington.
The money quote still is Obama's appraisal of Pakistan: "We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state."
Pakistani "sovereignty" is a joke; Pakistan is now openly being run from Washington. "We want to respect their sovereignty" does not mean "we" actually will. Obama and the Pentagon - which for all practical purposes treat Pakistan as a pitiful colony - would only be (relatively) comfortable with a new Pakistani military dictatorship. The fact that Pakistani public opinion overwhelmingly abhors the Taliban as much as it abhors yet another military dictatorship (see the recent, massive street demonstrations in favor of the Supreme Court justices) is dismissed as irrelevant.
The Swat class struggle
Interesting rebuttal by Watson.
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