“Beginning with Thailand in the 1950s, Americans have become inured to the CIA’s alliances with known terrorists, drug traffickers (and their bankers) to install and sustain right-wing governments, The modus- operandi has repeated itself in Laos, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Turkey, Pakistan and now Afghanistan. The relationship of the U.S. intelligence operations and agencies to the global drug traffic, and to other criminal networks deserves greater attention in the debate over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. After World War II, the United States, along with Britain and France, recurrently used both drug networks and terrorist groups as assets or proxies in the Cold War. By backing these groups, the great powers greatly increased the power and scope of both the drug traffic and terrorist groups. As a result, in the long run, they contributed to powerful forces that weakened the rule of law internationally and domestically.”
America’s wars on terror and drugs consist of both an amorphous structure and hypocritical DNA. When Obama visited Afghanistan in 2008, Gul Agha Shirzai was the first Afghan leader he met. The (London Observer reported on July 21, 2002), that in order to secure his acceptance of the new Karzai Government, Gul Agha Shirzai, along with other drug and warlords, had been “bought off” with millions of dollars in deals brokered by U.S. and British Intelligence. (See: American War Machine, Deep politics, the CIA Global Drug Connections and the Road to Afghanistan, Peter Dale Scott, 2010).
Unbeknownst to many Americans, and as a casualty of the information-war, the Taliban had virtually eliminated the production of opiates and heroin manufacture. Yet with the homogenized rendering of nightly newscasts across America, both the Bush and Obama Administrations alleged that the principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was derived from drug trafficking. An obvious dalliance with the truth with the intent to further demonize and de-legitimize the Taliban and others who resist the American occupation in the eyes of the American public, and to justify a war against a country and a people that cannot by any measure or reasonable standard be justified… and furthermore; a country and a people that had not [ever] threatened nor harmed the interests and or security of the U.S.
In addition to and in spite of America’s murky anti-terrorist and drug-DNA, manifest with the recruitment of known war criminals such as Rashid Dostum and others of the nefarious Northern Alliance, who were recruited and bribed with $500,000 in “stacks of newly-printed $100-dollar bills”, a first installment of a multitude of cash incentives by CIA operatives to further America’s grip on Afghanistan. And in recognition of the ancient proverbs: “don’t do what I do, do what I say, and the end justifies the means”, contrary to their public stance and rhetoric, America, throughout its history, has allied itself with the dregs of society, i.e., war criminals, drug lords, communists and terrorists. (See: First In, An Insider’s account of how the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, Gary C. Schroen, 2005, p. 92, and Ghost Wars, Steve Coll, 2004, pp. 467 and 494).
