Who profits from Afghanistan's Opium?

A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan described the open production of opium, open manufacture into heroin, and open export from the country.

That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

Murray doesn't go into detail about which US and UK officials and ultimately banks that launder the drug money might be benefiting from the drug trade, but he does give a helpful analogy of what happened to a Russian whistleblower on their part of the drug trade:

There are a number of theories as to why Litvinenko had to flee Russia. The most popular blames his support for the theory that FSB agents planted bombs in Russian apartment blocks to stir up anti-Chechen feeling.

But the truth is that his discoveries about the heroin trade were what put his life in danger. Litvinenko was working for the KGB in St Petersburg in 2001 and 2002. He became concerned at the vast amounts of heroin coming from Afghanistan, in particular from the fiefdom of the (now) Head of the Afghan armed forces, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in north and east Afghanistan...

Litvinenko uncovered the St Petersburg end and was stunned by the involvement of the city authorities, local police and security services at the most senior levels. He reported in detail to President Vladimir Putin. Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, and the people Litvinenko named were among Putin's closest political allies. That is why Litvinenko, having miscalculated badly, had to flee Russia.

I had as little luck as Litvinenko in trying to get official action against this heroin trade. At the St Petersburg end he found those involved had the top protection. In Afghanistan, General Dostum is vital to Karzai's coalition, and to the West's pretence of a stable, democratic government.

UK Daily Mail July 21, 2007

What are the chances that the assholes on Wall Street are using this drug money as a way to cover their bad bets or simply out of greed as was the case when they were caught with their hands in the drug money and terrorist cookie jar of BCCI?


That one involved former senators, congressmen, and cabinet secretaries as the final Senate Foreign Relations Conmmittee Report on BCCI included Brent Scowcroft, Clarke Clifford, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Henry Kissinger's firm among others.

If our Congress was doing it's job, they would investigate which banks are profiting from the billions in drug money that have to be laundered from a drug trade as large and out in the open as Afghanistan's, but they are unlikely to do that since it will undoubtedly lead back to the malignant cancers on Wall Street who outsourced our jobs, destroyed our economy, foreclosed our houses, and blackmailed us for trillions in bailouts.

Those cancers own our government, which means our troops will die guarding drug dealers and oil pipelines to ensure that the descendants of today's spoiled trust fund babies won't have to get a job for ten generations instead of nine.

MORE ON AFGHANISTAN

OIL THEFT MOTIVE FOR IRAQ WAR

Our Afghan War for Pipeline & Poppy Fields

"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless."

Napoleon Bonaparte

Former Senator Fritz Hollings wrote a piece for the Huffington Post asking why we are still in Afghanistan since our wars are producing more terrorists than they kill. He started off well, but sidestepped the geopolitic grown up talk that America never had about why we killed a million Iraqis and why we are still in Afghanistan.

It certainly has nothing to do with threats to our security. If that was the case, we would have invaded North Korea after they fired missiles over Japan.

And it has nothing to do with 9/11 since al Qaeda was financed and given logistical support by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the latter going as far as evacuating top al Qaeda leaders from Tora Bora when we had them cornered there.

If we didn't go after those two nations, it's hard to believe that having our troops in Afghanistan has anything to do with 9/11.

Instead, it is more likely we are in Afghanistan because someone thinks they can make a lot of money there, from the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline and so Wall Street can continue to collect the income from the Heroin poppies, just as the British did when they tried to force Afghan opium on the Chinese way back in the Opium War, and just as Bush was trying to force oil laws favorable to oil companies on Iraq, so they could collect up to 88% of the income from Iraq's tens of trillion of dollars worth of oil.

Energy companies courted the Taliban for a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to take natural gas to India but gave up in frustration shortly before 9/11. In 2006, India was concerned about continuing the project until America gave assurances that we would protect the pipeline.

UPDATE: Those assurances were repeated in 2008.
(Thanks to chill_wind at DU, who provided another good background link on pipeline)

The drug story is even less well-known, though the New York Times did cover the story of the Afghan president's brother being one of the largest drug smugglers in the country.

When Britain controlled Afghanistan, they owned the poppy trade. When the French owned Indochina, they owned the poppy trade there. Once we allied with the fundamentalists in Afghanistan in the 80's, drugs started flowing out of there, through Pakistan, and to the US. Do you suppose our leaders and business people are so pure they aren't getting a cut of that?

Wall Street has a bad habit of covering up their incompetence as businessmen with drug money.
The BCCI money laundering scandal involved some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, profiting from drug trafficking and handling money for terrorists. The New York Times and even PBS has even covered this drug money laundering business, and if you googled the name of your favorite big bank, you would more likely than not find they have been involved.

UPDATE: UN says drug money keeping banks afloat in financial crisis.
(Thanks to RubyGal at DailyKos for link)

John Kerry has documented CIA drug dealing, confirming the work of San Jose Mercury News Reporter, Gary Webb's uncovering of the Contras selling cocaine that flooded America's inner cities. The CIA itself has an odd history of picking a fair number of directors who came not from the intelligence community but from Wall Street or corporations. Like corporate lawyer John Foster Dulles or oil man George HW Bush. So it would make sense that the agency is looking after business more than our security.

It is about money. I appreciate Hollings asking the question, but he should have provided part of the real answer too.

And I guess it would be too much to ask that our new president set aside the propaganda bullshit about our various military operations, tell us who profits from them, and what if anything the average American gets out of them, so we could make an informed decision about whether to support killing people in dirt huts with our troops and our tax dollars, and nineteen and twenty year old American kids coming home in aluminum coffins.

UPDATES:

confirmation in Toronto Star

Iran out-manuevers US on pipeline through Pakistan

November 2009 updates:

Recently, Ron Reagan had a former CIA agent on his show who said the CIA controls 90% of the heroin trade.

A couple of respectable investigative reporters have followed up on this, Chris Hedges and David Lindorff.