Why would US Transform Afghanistan into a Drug Empire?
Today it is clear to pretty much everyone that Washington’s anti-drug campaign in Afghanistan has failed miserably in spite of the 8.5 billion dollars wasted on this conflict. According to expert, this year the level of drug production would be skyrocketing to unprecedented highs . The number of drug villages in Afghanistan have already exceeded last year’s figures, with about a third of the population being involved in the cultivation of opium poppy [...]
For a total of sixteen years the US has been occupying Afghanistan after invading immediately after the 9/11 attacks. This act of aggression has already become the longest war in American history, overtaking the “record” that was held by the Vietnam War that lasted from 1964 to 1975. During this period, Washington would spend over 800 billion dollars on the so-called reconstruction of the Afghan nation. As a result of this “reconstruction”, the Taliban has been regaining control over the country, which has resulted in this group controlling over 40% of Afghan territory. Additionally, opium production rates have overtaken the figures of 2001, as the Pentagon does nothing to combat drug trafficking.
It’s curious that according to the Al-Jazeera the estimated value of opium and its by-products produced in Afghanistan in 2016 reached 3.02 billion dollars up from 1.56 billion dollars in 2015. According to UN estimates, drug trafficking accounts for 15% of the Afghan economy, with every tenth person in the country being a drug addict! In comparison, the global average resides at the level of every twentieth citizen.
According to the experts engaged in fighting Afghan drug trafficking, an Afghan farmer would receive 600 dollars for eleven pounds of opium. However, a pound of heroin, produced from this amount would be sold for over 150 thousand dollars on the black market! At the same time, no one knows where in who’s pockets the missing 149 thousand dollars would go.
Under these conditions, what can be said about the forces of the United States who have allegedly been “protecting the country from the forces of international terrorism?”? How could local drug lords produce 6400 tons of opium in 2014 alone with a formidable force being deployed by NATO?
Once Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the country began producing up to 95% of all heroin on the black market. At the same time, Washington under various pretexts refuses to fight drug production.
When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they would mercilessly destroy opium poppy plantations and shot drug traffickers on sight. But once NATO pushed them to the southern provinces of the country in 2001, they were no longer able to resist the idea of receiving funds for their jihad from a such a lucrative business as drug trafficking. Now it is difficult to say how much resources received from the drug are being used for weapons purchases and other military needs of the Taliban or those cash flows are just being abused by local warlords, who have been transformed from fanatical radicals into ordinary drug dealers.
Today it is clear to pretty much everyone that Washington’s anti-drug campaign in Afghanistan has failed miserably in spite of the 8.5 billion dollars wasted on this conflict. According to expert, this year the level of drug production would be skyrocketing to unprecedented highs . The number of drug villages in Afghanistan have already exceeded last year’s figures, with about a third of the population being involved in the cultivation of opium poppy. Predictably, the number of drug trafficking operations keeps growing, as there’s new smuggling routes appearing , for instance, across Africa. Analysts say that both the “Balkan” route (Pakistan-Iran-Turkey-Europe) and new trails across Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine are being used heavily to get Europe drown in narcotics.
At the same time, tons of precursors for the manufacture of narcotic substances are illegally imported into Afghanistan annually. A total 66 tons of such chemicals was seized in 2016, while over 50 tons were confiscated in the first six months of this year alone! Moreover, according to reports presented in Afghan sources, such countries as Italy, France and the Netherlands are among the main suppliers of those suppliers.
That is why one cannot help but be amazed by the disability of the US and NATO forces, despite their continuous presence in Afghanistan, to provide an ample support to the government of the country in the fight against drug production, which remains one of main sources of financing of terrorism, the fight against which, according to official statements, is Washington’s primarily goal in Afghanistan. According to UN estimates, about half of the revenues of illegal armed groups in Afghanistan, estimated at the level of 400 million dollars, are coming from the drug trade. Under these circumstances, the recommendations drafted by the US Special Inspector General for the Rehabilitation of Afghanistan on the need to develop of a comprehensive anti-drug strategy in Afghanistan is getting increasingly relevant. John Sopko’s remarks about the 8.5 billion dollars wasted on the anti-drug campaign in Afghanistan shows its utter failure, as the drug production levels in Afghanistan are breaking records, and the country remains the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium.
The organization SIGAR, created to control the funds allocated for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, submitted a report according to which the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support the Afghan government. At the same time it is clear to pretty much everyone that the longest war in US history can not be won without a comprehensive plan to fight drug trafficking. After 16 years of bloodshed Afghanistan still accounts for 75% of the world’s heroin supplies, and remains to this very date a country with the highest concentration of terrorist groups in the region.
The Nangarhar Province has virtually become a black market hub for all sorts of terrorists and drug traffickers. There is a very close relationship between heroin traffickers and terrorist groups, as drug traffickers surrender a part of their proceeds from the sale of drugs to the Taliban as a “zakat” – an obligatory donation, which is one of the five pillars of Islam.
As long as the US remains reluctant to address this problem, Trump will not be able to fulfill his promise to win. So why would Washington transform Afghanistan into a drug empire?
First of all, hardly anyone today will doubt that it is the drug trade that allows the US and NATO to control the population of this country, as well as local leaders. Why counter fight the North Atlantic Alliance troops, if they provide an opportunity to have a stable source income, no matter how illegal? The degree of involvement of Afghan peasants in the production of drugs is eloquently evidenced by the fact that peasants are getting loans to cultivate poppy crops.
It should also be remembered that drug trafficking is a powerful instrument for influencing Europe, as well as Central Asian countries, by creating a problem of drug dependence among their population, as well as creating the ground for financial nourishment of criminal groups that are advantageous to pro-Washington opposition groups. By concentrating their efforts on the struggle with internal challenges, these states will be economically and socially weakened, thus reducing their activities on the international arena, giving Washington to rule the world uncontested.
Finally, there is a clear financial link between the Afghan drug lords and the Alliance troops. Transportation, patronage and ensuring the safety of drug production is often carried out by the forces of American weapons and American means of transportation.
In 2006, the United States adopted a federal law on the fight against drug trafficking, which made it illegal to participate in the drug trade in order to provide material support to terrorist organizations and individuals involved in terrorist activities. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, about 37% of all terrorist groups are related in one way or another to drug trafficking.
According to the report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in 2016, two-thirds of the world’s land used for the cultivation of opium poppy can be found in Afghanistan. In 2015, Afghanistan produced 77% of all world’s heroin. The purest injectable heroin that smugglers call “spin mal” that is being produced in the Nangarhar Province can be found all across the world, including the United States. And from here it is not difficult to understand who benefits from this drug trafficking.
So for some Aghanistan is a source of terror and death, while for others – a convenient opportunity for additional enrichment by engaging in the lucrative drug business.
Therefore, while the NATO countries and, in particular, the United States will have financial and political interests in the region, the problem of drug production in Afghanistan will remain one of the most important problems on the international stage.
Originally published on 2017-10-22
About the author: Valeriy Kulikov, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
A Unified Europe: Born In the USAWhile Brexit versus the continuation of the European Union is a hot news topic, few know the secret who and why of the EU’s creation.The lead financial writer at the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, wrote in 2000:Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe.***The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE [below, we’ll explain who these players are] in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo ...
A year ago, at a closed-doors meeting between the USA and EU officials and the leaders of the four major parties of FYROM in Strasbourg, a route map for the resolution of the protracted political crisis was agreed on (or rather imposed). The roots of this political crisis are to be found outside FYROM: it is actually more a confrontation by proxy between “the West”, which supports the opposition, and Russia, which is trying to maintain its influence in the region. In conjunction with the public discontent at government policies and the escalating corruption, the negotiations have contributed to sharpening ...
Imagine – the European Union were to collapse tomorrow – or any day soon for that matter. Europeans would dance in the streets. The EU has become a sheer pothole of fear and terror: Economic sanctions – punishment, mounting militarization, the abolition of civil rights for most Europeans. A group of unelected technocrats, representing 28 countries, many of them unfit to serve in their own countries’ political system, but connected well enough to get a plum job in Brussels – are deciding the future of Europe. In small groups and often in secret chambers they decide the future of Europe.Take ...
I am a lifelong FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Democrat and therefore am anything other than prejudiced against the Democratic Party. But, that Party died when Bill Clinton became President and undid FDR’s regulations on the megabanks and FDR’s AFDC income program for children in poor families, and when Clinton replaced that with restoration of Wall Street’s control over America (like before FDR, only a more convoluted form of it).However, the way in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endanger all people’s lives and property and health and welfare, has to do with something else, something that’s even more evil ...
GR Editor’s Note: This incisive article was written on April 30, 2003, by historian and political scientist Jacques Pauwels. A timely question: Why Does Hillary Want War… ? And why do people support her? * * *Wars are a terrible waste of lives and resources, and for that reason most people are in principle opposed to wars. The American President, on the other hand, seems to love war. Why? Many commentators have sought the answer in psychological factors. Some opined that George W. Bush considered it his duty to finish the job started, but for some obscure reason ...
Тhe world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...
For all the attention paid to the emergence of homegrown Islamist terrorists in Belgium, France and other European countries, one of the continent’s biggest radicalization problems is taking place on its fringes.Kosovo, the tiny Muslim-majority Balkan nation of just 1.8 million, has produced more foreign fighters per capita than any other Western nation since ISIS declared its now-defunct caliphate in 2014. Some 413 Kosovo citizens, including women and children, have joined that group and other Islamist extremist factions since the war in Syria began in 2012.As it attempts to join the European Union, Kosovo has been under pressure to stamp ...
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
“I can still see it very clearly, I have not forgotten,” says Títos Patríkios. “The Athens police firing on the crowd from the roof of the parliament in Syntagma Square. The young men and women lying in pools of blood, everyone rushing down the stairs in total shock, total panic.”And then came the defining moment: the recklessness of youth, the passion of belief in a justice burning bright: “I jumped up on the fountain in the middle of the square, the one that is still there, and I began to shout: “Comrades, don’t disperse! Victory will be ours! Don’t leave. ...
America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine –coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history. It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of ...
I was 23-years-old the first time I was arrested. It was at the Pentagon— an act of civil disobedience in protest of the U.S. war on Vietnam. My boyfriend, Jerry Rubin, and I were organizers for the National Mobilization Committee Against the War (familiarly called The Mobe).Here we call it the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese more accurately call it the American War. After all, the U.S. was the aggressor. It was our troops that landed on their soil; our planes that bombed their cities and sprayed Agent Orange; our army massacred their civilians, women and children included. Not the other ...
Much is being written regarding the Charlie Hebdo issue in Paris, France. I do not condone any killing but at the same time I do not support issues that violate human rights, religious freedom or freedom of speech and thoughts. Using cartoons to condemn Divine thoughts and beliefs is utterly wrong because they fall under hate crimes and not under freedom of speech as we are lied about. The perpetrators of hate continue to be protected. Islam is under attack and its adherents, the Muslims, are being targeted through provocation. In a recent article Charlie Hebdo and Tsarnaev’s trial: Cui ...
Milo Djukanovic’s thirty-year-old authoritarian kleptocracy is killing Podgorica's Democratic efforts.Largely unnoticed in the wake of events in the Middle-East and the impeachment drama, another crisis is brewing in the Balkans. In Montenegro, thousands of people have been protesting a new law passed by the Montenegrin parliament and signed into effect by the country’s longtime strongman, Milo Djukanovic, which gives the government authority over properties that religious organizations in the country have been using for at least a century. Evidence of the problems the controversial new law creates can be seen in the widespread condemnation it has received from individuals such ...
Last week’s announcement of a record-breaking US aid package for Israel underscores how dangerously foolish and out-of-touch is our interventionist foreign policy. Over the next ten years, the US taxpayer will be forced to give Israel some $38 billion dollars in military aid. It is money we cannot afford going to a country that needs no assistance to maintain its status as the most powerful military in the Middle East.All US foreign aid is immoral and counterproductive. As I have often said, it is money taken from poor people in the US and sent to rich people overseas. That is ...
Western allies raped hundreds of thousands of German women, writes German historian Miriam Gebhardt in a book published under the name “When the soldiers came” (Als die Soldaten kamen) and which received both praise and criticism in Germany.“At least 860,000 women and girls, but also men and young boys, were raped by ally soldiers after the fall of the Third Reich and in the postwar period. It happened everywhere,” writes Gebhardt, noting that US soldiers were the ones who did it the most.The book strongly echoed in Germany, where information on such crimes was known before but was almost exclusively ...
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists — Ernest HemingwayMilitary spending is the second largest item in the US federal budget after Social Security. It has a habit of increasing significantly each year, and the proposed 2019 defense budget is $886 billion (roughly double what it was in 2003).US military spending exceeds the total of the next ten largest countries combined. Although the US government acknowledges 682 military bases in 63 countries, ...
There is nothing extraordinary in the science in Serbia. It would not deserve particular attention of the European scientific community, if it were not for the fact that the case of Serbia turns out extraordinary, indeed.Let us start with an extraordinary question: would it be possible a state in contemporary Europe to sucumbe to a fashist rule (or communist or any other totalitarian government)? The answer is extraordinary too - yes. The case in point is Serbia.The trick is marked by Kosovo (see, e.g. P. Grujić, Kosovo Knot, 2014). When this southern province of Serbia, Kosovo and Metohia (Kosovo in ...
The edifice of the post-1991 world order is collapsing right before our eyes. President Putin’s decision to give a miss to the Auschwitz pilgrimage, right after his absence in Paris at Charlie festival, gave it the last shove. It was good clean fun to troll Russia, as long as she stayed the course. Not anymore. Russia broke the rules.Until now, Russia, like a country bumpkin in Eton, tried to belong. It attended the gathering of the grandees where it was shunned, paid its dues to European bodies that condemned it, patiently suffered ceaseless hectoring of the great powers and irritating baiting of the East European small-timers alike. But something broke there. The lad does ...
Recommended alternative reading list on the Yugoslav studies not used by mainstream corporative Western mass-media and top Western universities dealing with global security, world politics and international relations. Reading proposed readers below you can complete picture on the Yugoslav studies out of the official Western approach.March Pogrom 2004 Book and Photo EvidenceKOSOVSKA GOLGOTA Intervju 198820 Principal Misconceptions on Kosovo IssueThe Srebrenica Massacre Evidence Context Politics Edward S Herman Phillip CorwinLista Diane Budisavljevic 1941 Do 1945 by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićJosip Broz Tito Bez Maske! by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićHayden Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia by ...
Atrocities and war crimes are subjectively defined as acts of violence that exceed military necessity. All war includes atrocities. The stress of combat includes a build up of emotion during action that leads to vicious attacks on the enemy when the opportunity arises. American military units are trained and indoctrinated to avoid inhuman treatment of enemy combatants. Soldiers who violate the norms are prosecuted. This reduces but does not eliminate the problem.Photo of Vietnamese civilians killed by an American unit Atrocities During the Vietnam War The actions of armies in war have seldom been as humane as the modern American military -- ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
