The Afghan Drug War

Fortune magazine has an article Inside the Afghan Drug War ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ )subtitled: Afghanistan's drug economy is as pervasive as its poppy fields, linking impoverished farmers, heroin traffickers, and the Taliban. There has been recently a good deal of effort aimed at the short-memoried, detailing opium production in Afghanistan, how the Taliban is behind it, and how we - the USA and NATO - have always been opposed to it. This is, of course, a re-writing of History. The Media gets away with it, because its audience is essentially brain-dead and dull, yet avaricious for any scrap of information which floats its way. The audience of the American media reminds me of some huge, bloated underwater leviathan, sedentary in its cave, blinded to reality by its enforced captivity, and only able to see in the region of the electro-magnetic spectrum controlled by Media. Here in its lair it scoops up information floating plankton-like within easy range of its ever open mouth, lined with teeth worn and useless. Let's go back to February 15, 2001, before the magic date where everything changed, and the war began which might yet destroy one of the last vestiges of World War II: NATO. JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer. A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year. "We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies. ... Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam. The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops. The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies. (available at http://www.opioids.com/afghanistan/ ) It is a fact that NATO and the USA and the government of Karzai did little in the eight years they have been the power in Afghanistan to eradicate this trade. There have always been seizures and burnings for show at home, but from 2007 through 2008, opium production was at the highest levels ever. Who is responsible? Cui bono? Look to find out who profits. Essentially we have spent billions to secure cheap oil in Iraq - which is not cheap - and drug money for unnamed persons in Afghanistan. We have allowed certain people to control the opium trade for at least eight years. I do not think they are all Afghanis. I think there are many Americans - proud and patriotic and who encourage us to "win" this "war" - who have profited and continue to do so.