Looks like the "Good War" in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the "Drug War" that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world -- and especially against its own people -- for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights.

As The Times reports, and Pentagon brass confirmed, the "continuity government" of the Obama Administration has drawn up yet another "hit list" of people to be arbitrarily assassinated: 50 "drug lords" allegedly associated with the Taliban. No doubt the many drug lords associated with the American-installed Afghan government -- and those cooperating directly with the Western occupation -- are exempt from this dirty laundry list.

Of course, the runaway cultivation of opium in Afghanistan -- which is now flooding not only the West but also vast swathes of Central Asia with cheap heroin -- is a direct result of the American invasion in 2001: an operation ostensibly designed to capture Osama bin Laden, who somehow curiously slipped away from the Americans' curiously porous encirclement, never to be seen again (except of course for a few curiously timed transmission that seemed, curiously enough, to be geared to the domestic political needs of America's militarist factions). Of course, before the invasion, the Taliban had largely -- if ruthlesssly -- eliminated the cultivation of opium in the areas under its control. But the American military -- and its gung-ho CIA operatives ("We're killing people!" as one CIAer exulted to the Boston Globe) -- instead empowered the Northern Alliance: the Russian-backed conglomerate of warlords and druglords who were freely growing opium in their territories.

Now the Afghan insurgents -- themselves a loose conglomeration of factions given the conveniently misleading monolithic moniker of "the Taliban" -- have taken up the opium trade to help finance their operations as well. Meanwhile, poor Afghans are dependent on the opium trade, which fetches prices far above anything else they can grow. After all, their society and economy have been systematically destroyed by 30 years of savage war, kicked off not by the Soviet intervention in 1980 but by a terrorist campaign by religious extremists armed, funded and encouraged by the good Christian administration of Jimmy Carter, whose "national security" honcho, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wanted to draw the Soviets into "their own Vietnam" in support of their client regime in Kabul. Now, as Jason Ditz – an indispensible chronicler of the Terror War in Central Asia – points out, the Americans are adopting the Soviets' own failed strategy in Afghanistan: death-dealing military "surges" combined with wads of cash thrown blindly into the economic chaos caused by the military action.

But you can't "build" a state while you are simultaneously waging war inside it. And you certainly can't build it by killing  cucumber farmers, as U.S. forces did the other day. Expect even more of this as the Pentagon gears up its "Drug War" weaponry to eliminate the rivals of its favored criminals – sorry, I mean to wipe out the scourge of Afghanistan's Taliban drug lord devils.

If all of this seems grimly familiar, that's because it is. I've been writing about the merging of the Terror War and the Drug War in Afghanistan since… November 2001, a few scant weeks after the Bush Administration sent the "carpet of bombs" they promised the Taliban – back in June 2001; yes, before "the whole world changed" on 9/11 – if they didn't play ball on the oil pipelines that Western consortiums were looking to lay across Afghanistan. It was obvious even then where we were going, as I noted in the Moscow Times, in that long-ago November:

Among the isolated, out-of-step losers who dare open their mouths to mutter "doubts" about America's military campaign in Afghanistan, you will sometimes hear the traitorous comment: "This war is just about oil."

We take stern exception to such cynical tommyrot. No one who has made a clear and dispassionate assessment of the situation in the region could possibly say the new Afghan war is "just about oil."

It's also about drugs.

For, although we must now hail the warlords of the Northern Alliance as noble defenders of civilization, the fact is that for some time they have also functioned as one of the world's biggest drug-dealing operations. Indeed, one of the main sticking points between the holy warriors of the alliance and their ideological brethren in the Taliban has been control of the profitable poppy, which by God's grace grows so plentifully in a land otherwise bereft of natural resources. (Always excepting the production of corpses.)

In the good old days, when the brethren were united against the Soviet devil, all shared equally in the drug-running trade, under the benevolent eye of that great lubricator of illicit commerce, the CIA. When the Northern Alliance was driven from Kabul – having killed 50,000 of the city's inhabitants during their civilized rule – the Taliban seized the lion's share of Afghanistan's opium production. The noble warlords managed to hold on to several prize fields in the north, however, and together with avaricious Talibs, they helped fuel a worldwide rise in heroin traffic.

Earlier this year, the Bush administration bribed the Taliban to stop growing opium – a most effective use of baksheesh, according to the UN, which found that Afghan opium production dropped from 3,300 tons annually to less than 200. But the Northern Alliance leapt manfully into the breach, engineering a threefold rise in opium output on their territory this year.

This note of praise for the Bush pay-offs to the Taliban was not ironic; I heartily approve of the notion of large-scale bribery to achieve foreign policy objectives. It is much better – and in the end, far cheaper to the public purse – than the murderous ravages of war. Alas, the murderous ravages of war are all too often the actual objective of imperial foreign policy; the profits, power and domination that accrue to the warmakers are far more enticing than the non-violent ends that can be achieved by bribery (or even by, god forbid, actual diplomacy: negotiation, compromise, mutual respect, that kind of thing). Or as Cheritto put it so memorably to his fellow robbers in Heat: "You know, for me, the action is the juice."

And so on and on we go. The new head of the army of our Good War ally, Britain, is saying that the mission in Afghanistan "might take as long as 30 or 40 years." By which time there will not be "tomb enough and continent to hide the slain."

Comments (22)

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Ken Jackson said:

	I remember that opinion piece well And, I am absolutely sure that this "The new head of the army of our Good War ally, Britain, is saying that the mission in Afghanistan "might take as long as 30 or 40 years." By which time there will not be "tomb enough and continent to hide the slain."will come back to haunt us in Spades!
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August 11, 2009 | url
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Yankee 30 said:

	... "We had to destroy _________ in order to save it." a. Dresden b. Hiroshima c. Ben Tre d. Fallujah e. Detroit
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August 11, 2009
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scott douglas said:

... I distinctly remember shouting into the faces of petit-fascists in the early Eighties: "Just buy them [Central American Socialists] off! What is the problem?!" What I have more recently come to understand is this -- the American Imperial Machine does not seek stability or progress or global market unity. Only Hegemony. Brutality is not a cynical 'means to an end'; brutality is, in fact, a permanent Imperial mode which generates endless gutter-stopping lodes of silver and gold for the Plutocrats handling the levers of the Empire. The concomitant blood-flow in innocent life? Insectazoid. Immaterial. No matter. Logic and morality are dead in this system: I remember asking friends in the run-up to the first Gulf War: Why don't we just cut a deal with the thug? 'Give us (BP/EXON) 45% of service contracts on new fields, and we'll let you up off the mat'...No, that would not serve. Only Obliteration of MILLIONS of Iraqi lives and the forced, utter submission of the dehumanized survivors to the Masters in London and New York would suffice. This is the Machine to which we pledge our labour and our lives. Personally, I have had as much as I can take of this bullshit. Spiritually, socially, and economically. I don't think that I am alone. But I think that a lot of men such as myself have not yet shed their illusions and faced the facts about the corrupt society in which they are enmeshed. It is time to do that. Scott

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August 11, 2009
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gringo lost said:

	This is your brain on drugs. This is our counterinsurgency. This is our counterinsurgency on drugs. http://gringolost.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/this-is-your-counterinsurgency-this-is-your-counterinsurgency-on-drugs/ The US is putting itself into an open-ended war, with no relative strategic value.
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August 12, 2009 | url
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Jimmy Montague said:

	I'm tired of waiting -- I want my Ragnarok!
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August 12, 2009 | url
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Sean O'Neil said:

... Scott -- good comment. I will always raise the Iraq Study Group Report, Recommendations 63 and 64. It was bluntly stated that imperial conquest was the purpose of invading Iraq, but it was buried in those two Recommendations made amidst a whole lot of pontificating on what Iraq should or should not be -- as if it were America's call to make! There's a whole lot of people who have a whole lot of illusions. Stan Goff has optimism about this stuff, though I am not sure why. See his Feral Scholar blog for the entry re Blackwater. Mr Floyd's essay above was excellent, as usual. .................. Jimmy, have you been playing the computer game Max Payne II lately?

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August 12, 2009 | url
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Jimmy Montague said:

Computer Games? Mahjong and Minesweeper are the only two computer games I play, Sean. I only play those two when I'm intent upon frittering away the rest of my life. My poor old maternal grandmother did it with playing cards. She lived with us when I was a lad. I watched her growing older and weaker and more of a burden to herself year on year. By the time I was 14, she had taken to playing solitaire. By the time I was 16, she no longer played solitaire but only dealt it: game after game after game after game, she shuffled and dealt and shuffled and dealt until the deck was worn out, whereupon my mother gave her another deck, which she wore out in a like manner. You could sit down at the table and talk to her. She could carry a conversation and took time out for meals but when the talk and the meals were over, she always went back to wherever the cards took her. When I was 19 she started having animated conversations with people who were not in the room because they were in fact dead and had been so for decades. When she took up eating hard-boiled eggs with the shells on while she talked to the dead people, Ma put her in an old-folks home. She died four years later, when I was still in the Marines. I recently decided that, when I get caught up in trying to make sense of U.S. foreign policy, I'll do better to emulate Grandma. I haven't got too far down that road yet: so far, I'm still peeling my eggs.

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August 12, 2009 | url
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Sean O'Neil said:

	The reason I asked... ...is that Max Payne 2 is about a disgraced NYPD Detective who teams up with some Russian mob guys to ferret out corruption and crime. One of the Russian mobsters is building a huge nightclub called Ragnarok and there's a pretty epic, bloody shootout there. My grandmother passed time playing crossword puzzles.
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August 12, 2009 | url
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Yankee 30 said:

	digression Jimmy Montague, I liked the Grandma vignette, but I was thinking...old folks are notoriously deficient in calcium and eggshells are an excellent source for it. Just a thought... If ours don't go into the organic recycling bin, they get mixed in with the dogfood. Strong bones.
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August 12, 2009
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Bill Jones said:

	Arthur Silber I was thinking of slipping him a couple of bucks. Does anyone know if he's still alive?
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August 12, 2009
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scott douglas said:

... This is off the subject, as well; but it actually happened to me yesterday and I really think someone should know. Indulge me, if you will... Many of the regulars will know that I am a half-assed, self-published 'recording artist' who has maintained himself with working-class employment for decades. Now, I am on the downhill slope of the age-curve and prime fodder for a Depression lay-off. Well, yesterday the management instructed me to attend a meeting in which four retired, White evangelical 'Christians' would offer me free, voluntary, confidential counseling --on a weekly basis...all sponsored by my employer... Well. I flatly refused. Even to listen to the 'pitch.' I had never heard of anything so rediculous in my entire life. Could I afford to stiff my boss in this fashion, with my job hanging in the balance? Absolutely not. And yet, I did. I am doomed, now. I already was, but now the schedule will be moved up! I honestly don't know what is happening in this country. Half of the people I know are sleepwalking with a de-facto dictator's lapel pin hanging off their pajamas, and the other half are dancing some sort of delusional Tarantella full of racism, cold-war nonsense, and flat-out crank-fury! Health-Care reform? Dudes, the president is a Corporatist! There isn't going to be any F'ing Health-Care reform! But 'they' are ready to break out their guns imagining that socialism is just around the corner...HA! While I'm being offered confidential 'christian' counseling -- in the workplace! Oh, well... By the way: I have no money for Arthur, although I have sent him money a couple of times. If anyone has any cash, do him a favour. It will be a godsend to him. He deserves it. While we observe, and add our sloppy commentary to the web, Arthur composes and presents serious essays. Help him, if you can. Scott

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August 12, 2009
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Debbieaussie said:

	... Why, oh why, would anyone want to be drawn into a half century war? What is the saying about learning from history. Gawd maybe money is the root of all evil.
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August 13, 2009
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Dr. J. Boost said:

Glorious Liberations For "Liberations" US style, I tend to remember poor old José Rizal, who fought the Spanish, was then (for a few weeks) the first President of the Philippines, then executed by his US allies. That was not the only "liberation" - it rather has become a habit (as dirty as an old monk's in the Dark Ages). Think of 9/11 in 1973 in Chile, and actually such dates in most Central and South American countries. And the post-war colonial empire across the Atlantic (now with only one island blob left as US aircraft carrier inside the new competing power of the EU). And now, all the defense of the other unsinkable nuclear carrier in the Middle East, from Gaza to Pakistan. The bad tactic that was grew into a dinosaur of a strategy was just that bit of nurturing the disease that hurts your enemy - but Ooooh the pain! when the microbe spreads to become the rhino in your front garden. It is strange where some people seek their friends: Pinochet, Pol Pot, Marcos, Papa and Baby Doc, Diem, the South Korean Kim, Franco, Strasser, etc., etc. - And as Israel was cooperatng with racist Apartheid South Africa for nuclear progress, who can be surprised about the anti-semitism they treat their Arab cohabitants with? And who could be surprised at "nation building" the way it happens now in Afghanistan and Iraq? It reminds me of that film, "The Birth of a Nation" and its depicting of fratricide, and the justification of the KKK. Has anything changed since then? Not much, it seems.

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August 13, 2009 | url
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Mary O said:

Obvious question .... If our nation is waging war to promote the free flow of heroin into the West, whose interest exactly does this policy serve? Who is selling the heroin? And who is buying it? Heroin trade no doubt plays a small part, but more likely the Zionists who had grabbed control of our US Dept of Defense simply wished to encircle Iran. But Israel seems to be falling from power now, and by 2012, we could actually see our US Congress flushed clean of any Israel supporters. When political change comes, it comes quickly.

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August 13, 2009
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nor said:

Brothers in Crime Thanks for directing some attention to the often ignored significance of "narcodollars". The info that the US has now made it official policy to take out competitors in the heroin trade does not surprise me. We can already predict that by the end of the year the US banking system will need another bailout and according to UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa "that money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis" He did not say which banks, but if this article www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/part_2.html is true we might make an educated guess.

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August 13, 2009
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John Stanton said:

	Turkey, Drugs, Faustian Alliances and Sibel Edmonds 2004 http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/19237/ Ms Edmonds is still under a US State Secrets Order
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August 13, 2009
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John Stanton said:

	Counterinsurgency for the Masses Also...agreeing w/Floyd, a pillar of Obama's national security strategy is COIN...There is an interesting website from the US government that displays a logo that says All of Government, All of Society...COIN allows all wars to be lumped into one happy global conflict...We should be paying closer attention to Mexico...
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August 13, 2009 | url
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cronos said:

	You're so right Scott We are living in "1984".
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August 13, 2009
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Yankee 30 said:

	... John Stanton, Sibel Edmonds managed to make her deposition at the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington DC on August 8th. At least some of her story is now official record under oath. For what it's worth. Check it out at BRAD BLOG.
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August 13, 2009
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Lester Ness said:

Christian counselling, etc Scott, if the worst happens and you lose your job, think about teaching English over-seas for a year or two. I've been teaching in China for the last 12 years, and enjoy days. The political system is actually improving (unlike the USA) and ordinary people do not cooperate with it the way Americans do. The food is good, the students sweet-tempered, and I get a nap after lunch everyday. I can walk down the street with a beer in my hand, too. If you google "teach english china", you'll get a lot of sites offering jobs. Go with a public university. They don't offer as much money, but they will pay on time, etc. Contact me offline if you want to ask questions.

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August 14, 2009
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scott douglas said:

	http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/08/13/chris-floyd-9/ Hey, check out Floyd talking to Scott Horton on Antiwar.com radio. You have to wait for Chris to heat up, but when he does you get to hear the cool man behind all this smart writing... Scott
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August 14, 2009
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BLAQFATHER 1 said:

SOVIET AFGHANISTAN - WAR Years ago, and far away, The Former Soviet Union tried to convert Afghanistan and failed to see any success. A new Afghanistan constitution, ratified in 1964, liberalized somewhat the constitutional monarchy. In the ensuing decade, economic and political conditions worsened. In 1973 Daoud overthrew the king and established a republic. When economic conditions did not improve and Daoud lost most of his political support, communist factions overthrew him in 1978. In 1979 the threat of tribal insurgency against the communist government triggered an invasion by 80,000 Soviet troops, who then endured a very effective decade-long guerrilla war. Between 1979 and 1989, two Soviet-sponsored regimes failed to defeat the loose federation of mujahideen - guerrillas that opposed the occupation. In 1988 the Soviet Union agreed to create a neutral Afghan state, and the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. The agreement ended a war that killed thousands, devastated industry and agriculture, and created 5 to 6 million refugees. All references are D-Linked for Accuracy. Just drag and drop them into any search engine, or type them in manually. These links start with ( http:// ) Direct References Used in this Reference Blog : www.mongabay.com/reference/new_profiles/738.html news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7883532.stm Related Books : The Hidden war: A Journalist’s account Of the Soviet War In Afghanistan c. 1990 International relations publishing house By Artyom borovik The Great gamble The Soviet War in Afghanistan c. 2009 Harper Collins Publishers By Gregory Feifer

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August 18, 2009
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