In Afghan Fields The Poppies Blow...

This morning in The Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK03Df04.html

US goofs the Afghan election
By M K Bhadrakumar

...It was one thing to be dismissive when the former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Hamil Gul, alleged that American military aircraft were being used for drug trafficking in Afghanistan. It might also have been expedient to simply ignore the issue when well-informed Russian sources made media comments that US troops were doing roaring business in drug trafficking in Afghanistan running into hundreds of millions of dollars. But Khodaidad is a highly trained professional who knows what he is talking about.

The Indians know him, and so do the Russians. Khodaidad passed out from the prestigious Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun and was a product of the famous Fronze Military Academy in Moscow. He had a proven record in the communist government in Kabul as a highly decorated general; he led crack paratrooper brigades in the war in the early 1980s and he served as the army commander in the crucial Kunduz and Takhar frontline facing Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance. Britain, where he lived in exile for a decade, knows him too.

Therefore, when Khodaidad said on Sunday that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contingents from the US, Britain and Canada are "taxing" the production of opium in the regions under their control, he carried a stern warning on behalf of Karazi. It is a simple, direct message: don't throw stones while sitting in a glass cage...

Gosh. We never suspected.