New Book Details How NATO and The CIA Installed The 'World’s Leading Narco-State' In Afghanistan.

Journalist Seth Harp Reveals How The U.S. and NATOs War In Afghanistan Fueled The Drug Trade.

The Trump administration is currently waging war on Venezuela and threatening war with Colombia over evidence-free claims that the country’s presidents, Nicolás Maduro and Gustavo Petro, are involved in the drug trade and are leading “Narco States”.

One of the most outrageous elements of this propaganda campaign is- as journalist Seth Harp documents in his new book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces” - the role U.S. foreign policy plays in drug trafficking, most recently through installing a heroin trafficking puppet regime in Afghanistan.

As Harp notes in the book, :

Ever since World War II, illegal drugs have served as a common coin for the purposes of espionage, paramilitary operations, and covert actions, and the foreign entities that choose to work for the U.S. military and the CIA—the twin sentinels of global capitalism—often profit from this most capitalistic of all enterprises. Throughout its history, the CIA has worked to achieve American national security objectives in partnership with known drug traffickers, including the anticommunist Kuomintang, the founders of modern-day Taiwan; France’s Corsican mafia syndicates; Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro; Hmong irregulars in Laos as well as the Royal Lao Army; and the contra rebels of Nicaragua. But American foreign policy elites’ complicity in the international drug trade was never so substantial, sustained, witting, and consequential as in Afghanistan.

As Harp documents, the NATO/U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that ousted the Taliban turned Afghanistan into the “world’s leading Narco state”.

As Harp notes, “Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels. ‘The significant increase,’ the DEA reported, ‘is attributable to the fall of the Taliban, and the Taliban poppy ban.’ The amount of Afghan land under poppy cultivation more than tripled from 2003 to 2004. By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. In 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons. By way of comparison, Mexico, in a far-distant second place, produced just fifty tons that year, while third-place Myanmar put out a mere twenty-four. Colombia, the only other significant exporter of heroin, barely topped two tons.”

Furthermore, the U.S.-installed puppet regime, led by CIA asset Hamid Karzai, was deeply involved in the drug trade.

Harp writes, “In public, the State Department and Pentagon issued sunny assessments of the situation in Afghanistan and portrayed the American-backed client state, led by the longtime CIA asset Hamid Karzai, as a nascent democracy. But in private, White House officials knew from classified intelligence assessments that all the opium-producing regions of the country were back under the control of powerful narco-warlords, and that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, was now producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined. The Taliban, which issued edicts prohibiting its men from using drugs or trafficking them, had regrouped at the head of a popular insurgency and were mounting an increasing number of guerrilla attacks on American bases, decimating the United States’ Afghan proxy forces, who were frequently too stoned on opium, heroin, and hash to go out on patrol.”

Harp adds, “The original Taliban regime, after being deposed by the Northern Alliance, had decamped to the high-altitude Pakistani city of Quetta. In its stead, the United States installed Hamid Karzai, a mercurial monarchist clotheshorse and rumored heroin addict on the payroll of the CIA who exercised power and extended the new government’s writ out from Kabul through a patronage network of warlords, police chiefs, militia commanders, smugglers, and tribal mafiosi, many of whom were major drug traffickers.”.

Harp goes on to write, “Karzai’s government was primarily a military-industrial money-laundering machine for transatlantic security elites, a corrupt conduit through which a trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars flowed, but secondarily and almost as important, it was a massive drug cartel that produced nearly all of the world’s illicit opiates.”

Expanding on this, Harp notes, “Some of the top narco-bosses included”

-Muhammed Fahim, Karzai’s defense minister;

-Hazrat Ali in Jalalabad, a city whose airport was a gateway to India;

-Abdul Rashid Dostum on the border with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan;

-Gul Agha Sherzai in Nangarhar;

-and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half brother, also a paid CIA asset, who set himself up as the kingpin of Kandahar, through which the illicit riches of the Helmand flowed.

The effects of the drug trafficking U.S./NATO regime in Afghanistan on the U.S. and the World included:

The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers. ‘Heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat,’ the Orange County Sheriff’s Office told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. ‘We are seeing more seizures and more overdoses.’ The Times interviewed addicts across the country who spoke of the recent advent of ‘a different kind of heroin,’ clean enough to snort or smoke with no need for needles. ‘It is very, very strong,’ and ‘cheaper than the other stuff,’ a recovering addict in Portland told the newspaper. Reams of articles in prestigious medical journals described a rapid rise in overdoses in the United States, resulting from an influx of ‘China white’ heroin—so called for its porcelain color, not its actual origin. Even in the most remote rural counties, especially in New England, Appalachia, and the Midwest, nearly pure heroin was available on the street at prices much lower than what dealers charged for prescription opioids diverted from the licit drug supply.

Harp noted that the DEA covered up that the Heroin was coming from the puppet regime in Afghanistan, writing, “According to the DEA, virtually none of the heroin consumed in America during the surge in usage seen in the 2000s and 2010s came from Afghanistan”, adding that “sifting through twenty years of threat assessments, I found that the agency’s twin tracing programs are riddled with untenable assumptions and so limited by selection biases as to be virtually meaningless. For instance, the heroin domestic monitoring program excludes any busts involving more than $200 worth of drugs, as well as seizures at airports. Nearly all Afghan heroin imported to the United States arrives by air, while heroin from South America is smuggled overland, across the Mexican border.”

He added that, “Most glaringly, fully 60 percent of the heroin that the DEA analyzed was a highly purified white powder ‘of an unknown classification’ and with an ‘inconclusive origin component,’ to which the DEA peremptorily applied the made-up nomenclature ‘Alleged Mexican White,’ on the unexplained grounds that it was ‘most likely made from Mexico-produced poppies,’ even though Mexican heroin is famously black in color and low in quality.”

He noted that in 2008, when, “The New York Times published a report that linked burgeoning Afghan drug production to officials at the very top of the corrupt client state led by Hamid Karzai”, “The response of American officials to revelations like these, which sporadically surfaced in the national press throughout the occupation of Afghanistan, was to simply blame the Taliban and portray the spreading insurgency and proliferating poppy cultivation as intertwined phenomena”.

But as Harp noted, “there is no evidence that the Taliban, which from the time of its emergence had an antidrug agenda in its ideological DNA, was ever involved in the opium and heroin trade to any significant degree” adding that, “in a 2018 retrospective on counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, repeatedly noted the absence of hard proof that the Taliban insurgency was financed by drugs”, and that “Kirk Meyer, director of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, which was set up to disrupt the Taliban’s sources of revenue, told SIGAR, ‘I personally never believed it was as big a funding source for the insurgency as a lot of people thought.’”.

Harp added, “Afghan traffickers held up in the mass media as Taliban-affiliated narcos, such as the Baloch drug lord Juma Khan, turned out to be CIA assets.”

“By contrast”, Harp writes, “SIGAR found ample evidence that the U.S.-backed client state was directly or indirectly involved in the drugs business at every level of government and in every region of Afghanistan. The army, police, court system, parliament, and national executive were corrupted by drug money, SIGAR reported. The border police were in on the game, as were customs officials and provincial, district, and municipal governors. ‘Almost everyone in influential positions in public life was somehow tainted,’ said the former British ambassador. As a result, the drug trade ‘eroded the legitimacy of the Afghan state,’ SIGAR found, and ‘undermin[ed] the rule of law.’”.

Harp went on to note that the CIA willingly collaborated with its drug trafficking puppets, writing:

Drug money flows from Afghanistan to Dubai were traced back to people close to President Karzai. The United States’ limited, underfunded, half-hearted antidrug programs, which were pawned off on British forces and which Karzai worked to thwart, were a complete failure. The military only grudgingly participated, seeing poppy eradication as ‘detrimental to its mission,’ and the CIA flat out refused to take part. ‘The CIA instead prioritized its relationships with significant traffickers, such as Haji Bashir Noorzai and Haj Juma Khan,’ SIGAR reported.

Seth Harp documents that the U.S. support of drug traffickers in Afghanistan got worse under Obama’s second term, writing:

In his second term in office, President Obama completely abandoned any remaining effort to counter narcotics in Afghanistan, and it became implicit U.S. policy to allow poppy to flourish unimpeded. The amount of land under poppy cultivation expanded to nearly a quarter million hectares. Major traffickers protected by the Karzai cartel, such as Lal Jan Ishaqzai, became untouchable.

Harp concludes:

In the English-language press, the world of nonprofits connected to the State Department, network and cable news, and the Democratic and Republican Parties, total silence descended over the topic of heroin production in the Helmand, Kandahar, Nangarhar, and other Afghan provinces where U.S. soldiers were not infrequently photographed patrolling vast fields of poppy. No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working classes across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza. A willful ignorance toward the subject prevailed in polite society in Washington and New York. ‘It was rarely mentioned in policy circles either in Afghanistan or in Western capitals,’ said the SIGAR report.

With the U.S. launching regime change war in South America under the phony pretext of a “war on drugs,” it is worth documenting how U.S. and NATO foreign policy has fueled the drug trade, including most recently by propping up a puppet regime in Afghanistan, which, during the U.S. occupation, was the world’s leading Narco state.

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