Addicted to War: America's Brutal Pipe Dream in Afghanistan

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Addicted to War: America's Brutal Pipe Dream in Afghanistan
Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:39

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.

...

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1814-addicted-to-war-americas-brutal-pipe-dream-in-afghanistan.html#comments

[G_j]

1. good article by Chris Floyd.

& a nasty mess it is

[stray cat]

2. Should funding for the taliban be cut off or unlimited?

Will unlimited funding through opiate production increase the military potential of the taliban and will it go to terrorist groups

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs <"From the Shadows">, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

SNIP

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

[HamdenRice]

4. Didn't you post the same thing yesterday? nt

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. No

But a dishonest broker would make such a false assumption and fastidiously avoid commenting on the substance of the piece.

At least you're consistent.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Afghanistan's "invisible history".

Invisible History Afghanistan’s Untold Story

When the Soviet Union crossed their southern border and invaded Afghanistan at Christmas of 1979, few outside the national security establishment of the major western capitals understood the game of deception at play. Dramatized as the greatest threat to peace since World War II by President Jimmy Carter, Afghanistan rolled the clock back thirty years on U.S./Soviet relations, justified the largest buildup of American force since World War II and paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s “conservative revolution” that changed the face of the American economy and its politics.

Absent from the news media coverage of Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s and after was any hint that Afghanistan had for years been at the center of a multinational intrigue that saw the United States and its allies (known by insiders as the Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis) plotting to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty while using it as a stepping stone for control of Central Asia.

Following the events of September 11, 2001 Afghanistan would again drastically shift the foundation of American politics, while advancing a foreign policy devoted to endless war and military budgets even larger and more ruinous than those of the 1980’s.

As told by the first Americans to pierce the media blackout surrounding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1981, our book reveals the shocking story of how American policy transformed Afghanistan from a Cold War buffer state into a secure multi-billion dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism while setting the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. The true story of how America’s policy makers undermined American security from within, Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story provides the sobering facts and details that every American should have known about America’s secret war, but were never told

http://www.invisiblehistory.com/the-book/