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Col. Eugene Khrushchev: Afghanistan: US Drug Policy, Total Corruption or Utter Insanity?
Richard Holbrooke
AFGHANISTAN: US DRUG POLICY, TOTAL CORRUPTION OR UTTER INSANITY?
By Colonel Eugene Khrushchev (ret) STAFF WRITER/Editor
The new American drug policy is easy to understand. America is telling the world it can no longer eradicate opium/heroin production because “poor farmers” are going to suffer. In truth, the poppy fields America now protects are run by drug lords with ties to the Karzai regime. America is building a narco-mafia behind the government of Afghanistan tied to an unsound and corrupt policy being peddled by the Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke.
The US has no plans to eradicate drug production in Afghanistan, production they and everyone else claims is funding the Taliban and is certainly pumping 65 billion dollars into somebody’s hands. This is what NATO commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has decided to do:
McChrystal’s solution is to set up a “slush fund” to pay off the Majah opium poppy growers. What this is doing is to dismantle any real counter-narcotics program the DEA and SOF were supposedly implementing. What we are learning is that the US State Department, for reasons unknown and unknowable, wants to manage Afghanistan as a crime ridden “narco-state” for the foreseeable future.
What the Secretary of State called “the best decision in the face of an array of less-than-perfect options” has set in motion the worst-case nightmare scenario – a boon for the drug lords, a bane for the drug busters.
What the “drug eradication” policy does is simple. It eradicates no drugs, it supplies money to criminal elements that destabilize the government, destroys the internal tribal system America’s war policy depends on and is building unstable and ungovernable regions that will support terrorism and extremism forever.
The essence of this nefarious proposition, promoted by narco lobby special envoy to the US Richard Holbrooke, was unveiled in theWashington Post on April 13:
“Marines try unorthodox tactics to disrupt Afghan opium harvest”.
The article carefully misleads a gullible reader to believe this hoax was initiated by the White House to be happily implemented by the US Marines. Though the narco envoy was never mentioned in the WP piece, it was Richard Holbrooke who concocted The Bucks for Drugs subterfuge and dispatched his minion John Kael Weston to bamboozle Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
As the story goes, the Marines ought to cash in $12 million from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program – “to disrupt the Afghan opium harvest”.
The whole scheme is a total scam, nothing is “disrupted,” far from it. In fact the policy is much closer to “agricultural support and
subsidy,” with the product being death dealing narcotics and the goal almost too insidious to imagine.
Opium mythology
Here are the main fraudulent premises of the swindle – political & financial – attributed to the US administration as outlined in the Washington Post:
• “Eradication would drive farmers into the hands of the insurgency”
• “Poppy farmers are poor creatures who face economic peril if they cannot harvest or sell their crops”
These disinformation sound bites betray the Holbrooke hallmark and are adroitly exploited by narco-insurgency propaganda. Ambassador Thomas Schweich, a former US top drug buster in Afghanistan, exposed this drug lobby guerilla marketing in his seminal article “Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?” in the NYT way back in July 27, 2008:
“Karzai had long opposed aerial eradication,” (p.2) Why? “More than 95 percent of the residents of the poppy growing provinces [Helmand & Kandahar] – voted for Karzai.” (p.7)
“Poppy cultivation was becoming limited to the south, more associated with the insurgency and disassociated from poverty…UNODC convincingly demonstrated that poor farmers were abandoning the crop and that poppy growth was confined to the wealthiest parts of Afghanistan…It rejected the idea that farmers would starve without the poppy, concluding that ‘poverty doesn’t appear to have been the main driving factor in the expansion of opium poppy’.”
“UNODC shattered the myth that poppies are grown by destitute farmers…Eighty percent of the land under poppy cultivation in the south had been planted with it only in the last two years …these farmers didn’t need an alternative livelihood. They had abandoned their previous livelihoods…to take advantage of the security vacuum [which coincides with UK military presence] to grow a more profitable crop: opium…Yet Afghan officials continued to say that poppy cultivation was the only choice for its poor farmers.” (p.4)
“The ‘starving farmer’ was a convenient myth. [NATO] …wanted to avoid any uptick in violence from [counternarcotics] strategy, even if the strategy would result in long-term success…the Taliban loved it because their propaganda campaign consisted of trotting out farmers whose fields had been eradicated and having them say that they were going to starve.” (p.5)
Ponzi scheme
What WP spins as “unorthodox tactics” and “one of the most novel US attempts to crack down on Afghanistan’s drug trade” is a highly inaccurate depiction of what is actually happening. The drug trade is being built, protected and now subsidized with no mention of the massive distribution and banking empire supporting it and enriching many players, few of them from Afghanistan.
Back to Ambassador Thomas Schweich:
“Payment for eradication is disastrous counternarcotics policy:
if you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a ‘perverse incentive’, and it has never worked anywhere in the world.” (p.8)
ARE AMERICA’S EFFORTS SIMPLY TOTALLY MISGUIDED OR UTTERLY CORRUPT?
How does the world’s largest money laundering scheme and the world’s largest narcotics distribution network totally escape American attention in Afghanistan? This isn’t America’s first “dance” in this arena, with a massive drug war on its border with Mexico and decades of efforts in South America having little or no effect.
We are also ignoring decades of substantive reports of CIA involvement in using narcotic trafficking to fund covert operations. You can’t turn on a TV without seeing this mentioned, the CIA-drug connection is a major part of American culture. Former FBI translator, Sibel Edmond’s testimony of US involvement in shipping drugs from Afghanistan on rendition flights has proven to be widely reliable and has received key support from members of the military and intelligence community
With America’s mainstream media running interference for these confused, misguided and corrupt efforts through taking part in a combination of spin and cover-up, a debate on a rational policy will be impossible.
I didn’t know that Rear Admiral Gregory Smith could manipulate Washington Post imbed at CAMP LEATHERNECK as a message multiplier for Richard Holbrooke narco propaganda. Now I do – and you do too.
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Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=31458
Posted by Col. Evgeny Khrushchev on May 15 2010, With 0 Reads, Filed under AfPak, WarZone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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I am sick of this issue of drugs being an issue. Americans seem to love to deny addiction issues at home. Their sons and daughters in the US military unaware maybe, but (surely) proudly ignorantly serve their part in trafficking drugs, ending up on America streets, and shot into their veins.
If it were not so grandly sad the story about our military’s part drug trafficking in Afghanistan, it would be funny in a bizarre way. To console myself I can only look along our Mexican border and shake my head in disbelief. Denial is nothing new to our tax paying tea partying Americans.
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Richard Holbrooke is a corrupt Zionist Jew who is linked to the bankster gangsters through AIG where he is a board member. He was appointed as a professor-at-large at Brown University prior to his current appointment by the head woman at Brown: Ruth Simmons who never refused to admit any one referred to her by Hank Paulson. Ruth Simmons was on the board of Goldman Sachs till recently.
Americans want to believe in their government. Slowly the truth is being told. People who work against long term sustainable world peace are being exposed. The Bush administration was full of Americans who did not give a damn about anything except their own greed. They even this greedy grandiose culture up with their narrow minded racist Christianity.
How perverse can humans be? Yes in the United States we have turned to insanity. Slowly it is eating our insides out.
Gene I feel Russia works for peace with an honest passion, more transparent then my own government. This is very sad. Thanks for your article.
From Genes heading alone let me respond.
Is US Drug Policy Insane or Corrupt? Basically it is a policy of contrived white protestant British and American guilt. Oxymoron guilt. We are walking through our Afghan policy like a zombie hoping Afghanistan will go away. There is no money to be made. The VA is full of disability claims.
We are there only because of contrived guilt. Nothing more and nothing less. The template the US is using for this drug policy comes from an old familiar template Oliver North used in Latin America. Let’s use drug profits.
It is a convenient, and lazy a policy based on a lack of long term political will.The old Soviet Union had at least a long term policy for Afghanistan. Our US Afghan policy today, is a policy based on political convenience.
The American Afghan policy was and is based on what happened on 9/11 in NY. Allowing for an oxymoron it is not about terrorism world; strange as it sounds.
Now Americans are contriving guilt in their Afghan policy. Again using drugs as a tool paying for the war, and feeling guilty at the same time.
9/11 was allowed to happen and naively. Mostly incompetently encouraged by US intelligence, in their “end of times chosen people” trusting regards relating to Israel.
US Intelligence was the buffoon. They looked the other way. Now the CIA has institutionalized dark forces intelligence Cheney said should be part of out foreign policy. Hence our drug policy, assassinations, and convenient passenger plane downing s.
If bloggers are right 9/11 was a third flag operation against the US. It was allowed to happen. The purpose of 9/11 had nothing with terrorism, or anything other then to instigate an attack on Israel’s enemies. To further Israel’s expansion. To most in the Bush White House it was “about being an instrument of God”. If you are an “instrument of God” you can justify anything.
Bush let this attack happen because it was again a convieniant target. Bush in his WASP arrogance sprinkeled with his “born again conversion” experience ignorance, cared little about 9/11 victims because “God was on his side”. “He was God’s instrument”.
They were to him and his minions collateral victims in an “end of times” games. He. GW Bush could be an instrument in “bringing Jesus back”. As bizarre as it sounds this is how he thought. This is how today corporate republicans think along with their “cannon fodder” producing mainly lower mid west and southern US followers.
To further his “born again in Jesus God’s will”, Bush could then solidify control over more of the worlds oil resources by attacking, controlling it’s oil fields and production for his friends and family, while at the same time pleasing pop-pi his father, and pop pi’s friends in Carlyle group making them richer and more powerful.
When French president Sarkozy leaves his office in Paris he will join his brother at Carlyle, and dine with John Major.
Irag and Arab US mid east policy since the founding of Israel has been all about Israel and the “second coming of Jesus” for Americans. It was and is today part of the grand plan for America, to support Israel even to death. It is our manifest destiny to these psychopaths.!
After 9/11 the media would conveniently point their finger at the Islamic world angry at the west. They make excellent photos for the evening news.
This attack had a mobilizing effect mobilizing Americans for hatred and war. The Bin Laden players played the part well. What a visual America had of them running around in the Afghanistan mountains with full beards, and flowing robes.
Folks this Afghan drug policy is a lazy policy, and is not a new policy. They copied it from Oliver North, and the Reagen/Bush 1 White House. At least the moral justification for using drugs as a tool. A precedent was there in place.
Our Afghan drug policy is a lazy policy. Now Obama and all party politics in DC want Afghanistan to go away. It is now going to take money from congressman, and his corporate friends. Money normaly used to get reelected. Ego money.
Global Wall Street Corporations will have to pay higher taxes because some of this borrowed money needs to be paid back. Certainly not blue collar America. There is not much money at the bottom rung anymore, with all the Wall Street corruption.
THe US wants out of Afghanistan. Do not listen to Hillery she wants out. It is costing us money. Money that corporations could use. Things have changed since no bid contracts.
Now we have Department of Veteran Affairs regional offices full of disability claims. Congress does not want to pay for it’s wars. Americans do not want to pay for wars and their taxes raised. All because of Wall Street needs.