"Good War" Morphs Into Drug War

[bigtree]

from Chris Floyd: http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/11090-addicted-to-war-americas-brutal-pipe-dream-in-afghanistan.html


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

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 . . .


read more: http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/11090-addicted-to-war-americas-brutal-pipe-dream-in-afghanistan.html

[Joanne98]

1. The good ole drug war excuse!

:sarcasm:

[Orsino]

2. "Morphs." I get it.

Thanks for the link.:scared:

[frylock]

3. obama never promised he wasn't going to expand the war against some drugs