http://www.examiner.com/afghanistan-headlines-in-national/western-complicity-afghanistan-heroin-trade-is-old-news?sms_ss=reddit said:
U.K. military police are investigating claims that British and Canadian troops have been smuggling heroin out of Kandahar according to the BBC on Sunday. Well, it's about time because one of the worst kept secrets in Afghan history is that Westerners have their hand in the Central Asian drug trade, most notably the United States via the C.I.A.
Today, Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the world's opium, a multi-billion dollar industry which fuels the insurgency and is destabilizing the region. The drug trade allows militants to purchase weapons with which they then attack the Afghan government and international forces. Which makes Western culpability even more maddening.
Yet the C.I.A. has been accused of enabling the explosion of the drug trade in the AfPak region, stretching back to the 1980s when they funded the Afghan mujahideen via Pakistan's spy agency to wage a holy war against Russia.
Before 1979 Pakistan was not a major exporter of heroin. In 1984 80% of all heroin consumed in Britain and 30% of U.S. imports came from Pakistan thanks to the collaboration between the C.I.A. and Pakistani intelligence. According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade:
"CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests."
According to Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald in Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, the drug trade was financed through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) - which acted as a go-between for D.C., Hong Kong, Peshawar and Switzerland - laundering drug money and facilitating arms sales to Nicaraguan Contras and Afghan mujahideen.
Jack Blum, former special counsel to the 1987 “Kerry” Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Relations, claimed that the C.I.A., Mossad, Arab intelligence, the Russians and the British also used BCCI to finance arms deals and drug smuggling operations. Blum said:
“The amounts of heroin were staggering, the amounts of money involved were staggering. There was a seizure of a ship off the coast of Turkey that had come from the Makran coast of Pakistan that had twelve tons – metric tons – of heroin and heroin derivatives on it. That is such a startlingly large number, it’s sort of like the world’s supply for a year.”
During the 1980s the CIA partnered with the Safari Club, which was a network of foreign intelligence agencies formed to help the CIA fund operations not authorized by Congress, to transform Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market. Congress knew about mujahideen drug dealing as early as 1984 but turned a blind eye because the opium profits were financing the aforementioned U.S. jihad against the Soviet Union.
By 2003, Afghanistan’s heroin problem had grown twenty times worse than it was under Taliban rule according to a report by Hy Rothstein, a Special Forces veteran and teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey California, who had been commissioned by the office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict to conduct a military study of why the U.S. was not making progress in Afghanistan. As of yesterday’s BBC report, since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, Afghanistan's opium output has increased 33-fold.
In a 2007 Daily Mail piece, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, reported that Western intelligence agenices direct and indirectly helped Afghanistan go from simply farming poppies to converting opium into heroin on an industrial scale. Murray wrote:
How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government. The government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.
Murray also asserted that vast amounts of heroin came from the fiefdom of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the head of Afghan's armed forces, in north and east Afghanistan:
Dostum is an Uzbek, and the heroin passes over the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it is taken over by President Islam Karimov's people. It is then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to St Petersburg and Riga.
Murray’s appeals have fallen on deaf ears because General Dostum is vital to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's coalition and to Western pretense of a stable, democratic government.
The C.I.A. has protected a number of Karzai cronies and relatives involved with the drug trade, including Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, Karzai's former governor in Helmand Province who was caught with 9 tons of opium and heroin in his basement in 2005. Karzai actually tried to reinstate Akhunzada in 2008 to no avail. The President’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been accused of being one of the biggest druglords in Afghanistan, but he too is on the C.I.A.’s payroll.
Former Russian military Commander, Mahmut Gareev, claimed the U.S. was not going to stop the production of drugs in Afghanistan because it covered the costs of their military presence there.
"Actually, they (the US and NATO troops) themselves admit that if drugs were smuggled past them, they wouldn't interfere. Why? …. Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year — which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there."
Jeff Stein reported in The Washington Post just a few weeks ago that bags of cash believed to be drug proceeds and diverted foreign aid are leaving Afghanistan via the Kandahar airport which is controlled by Ahmed Wali Karzai. According to a former C.I.A. official:
“The direct Ariana flight from Kandahar to Dubai in its cargo hold carries many bales of U.S. dollars wrapped in burlap. No hand carry. This is AWK’s preferred route.”
Afghan intelligence agents have corroborated the story and have provided the ex-C.I.A. employee the locations of where Ahmed Wali meets C.I.A. operatives, what his monthly salary is, how it is delivered and the names of the two C.I.A. women who do the actual cash transfer.
These are startling reports indeed, made more distressing by the fact that no law enforcement official of fit mind would dare investigate the C.I.A. and its beneficiary's drug trafficking racket.
. but yea 9 tone is 18000 pounds thats a shitload of what I imagine is nearly uncut heroin.