Opium, Rape and the American Way

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091102_opium_rape_and_the_american_way/

By Chris Hedges

The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.

“We need to tear the mask off of the fundamentalist warlords who after the tragedy of 9/11 replaced the Taliban,” Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament two years ago for denouncing government corruption and the Western occupation, told me during her visit to New York last week. “They used the mask of democracy to take power. They continue this deception. These warlords are mentally the same as the Taliban. The only change is physical. These warlords during the civil war in Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 killed 65,000 innocent people. They have committed human rights violations, like the Taliban, against women and many others.”

“In eight years less than 2,000 Talib have been killed and more than 8,000 innocent civilians has been killed,” she went on. “We believe that this is not war on terror. This is war on innocent civilians. Look at the massacres carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Look what they did in May in the Farah province, where more than 150 civilians were killed, most of them women and children. They used white phosphorus and cluster bombs. There were 200 civilians on 9th of September killed in the Kunduz province, again most of them women and children. You can see the Web site of professor Marc Herold, this democratic man, to know better the war crimes in Afghanistan imposed on our people. The United States and NATO eight years ago occupied my country under the banner of woman’s rights and democracy. But they have only pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They put into power men who are photocopies of the Taliban.”

Afghanistan’s boom in the trade in opium, used to produce heroin, over the past eight years of occupation has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban, al-Qaida, local warlords, criminal gangs, kidnappers, private armies, drug traffickers and many of the senior figures in the government of Hamid Karzai. The New York Times reported that the brother of President Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been collecting money from the CIA although he is a major player in the illegal opium business. Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium in a trade that is worth some $65 billion, the United Nations estimates. This opium feeds some 15 million addicts worldwide and kills around 100,000 people annually. These fatalities should be added to the rolls of war dead.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091102_opium_rape_and_the_american_way/">Continued...

That's why GWB picked Hamid for President in the first place.

/paging Octafish...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1029/p02s01-usmi.html

Ahmed Wali Karzai and the CIA: America's conundrum in Afghanistan

A report in Wednesday's New York Times alleging that the CIA is secretly paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, a man reputed to be one of Afghanistan's biggest drug barons, throws into sharp relief the most crucial question the administration now faces in Afghanistan...

-snip

General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, wants Mr. Obama to send at least 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan to carry out a classic counterinsurgency. This strategy is centered on protecting the Afghan people and giving them the security needed to rebuild local economies and – in the long run – create stability. That stability would give Afghanistan the will and the capacity to repel Al Qaeda, says McChrystal.

But if this is America's goal, making secret deals with men like Mr. Karzai, the Afghan president's brother, could be more than counterproductive. It could be disastrous. The Times quoted Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan, on what it means:

"If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves."

http://gawker.com/5391447/ahmed-wali-karzai-afghani-gangster

Ahmed Wali Karzai: Afghani Gangster

...

And not only that: In addition to doing things to help the American war effort, like putting up special forces and fielding a paramilitary organization, check out all the gangster-type "legitimate busy-ness" Karzai allegedly does with the money we give him:

Charges "huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross bridges!" "Nothing to see here, officer, just your normal, everyday drug trafficking toll booth."

Manufactures "hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother's re-election effort in August," then calmly assures the Washington Post that his brother will win "by a very large margin"!"Trust me, Hamid's got unbeatable... policies."

Calls up an Afghan commander who has captured a large shipment of heroin and say to him: "This heroin belongs to me, you should release it." "I bought all this heroin to... turn over to the proper authorities."

Improbably survives a massive suicide bomb that leaves 17 other people dead! "What, I'm a lucky guy, alright?"

We have a whole raft of CIA assets over there who make the Talban look like girl scouts.

http://pkonweb.com/tag/gen-abdul-rashid-dostum/

Dostum, Shebergan and Swat

President Obama on Monday ordered US security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of pro-Taliban prisoners in 2001.

The prisoners were in the custody of Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, a prominent warlord who served as chief of staff of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban army and remains a prominent member of the Karzai government.

-snip

“Rashid Dostum, who is a law unto himself in his Uzbek home base of Mazar-i-Sharif, sees others as interlopers. The foreign fighters in Konduz who were tricked into surrendering to Rashid Dostum were dead men walking, given his track record there was no way they would ever walk out of Qila-i-Janghi alive.

-snip

in 2002 that over a three-day period hundreds of Taliban prisoners were slain in the desperate uprising in Qila-i-Janghi fortress prison which was put down by Dostum’s troops in November 2001.

The survivors were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water. Many suffocated or were killed when guards shot into the containers. A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source concluded that about 1, 500 Taliban prisoners died, including hundreds of Pakistanis