Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin.

As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire jeopardy.

But you would not know this if you follow the biased western press, notably the big US TV networks, social media and the BBC which thinks it’s Britain’s old colonial office. Western media has focused almost exclusively on the supposed plight of well-off westernized Afghan women in Kabul. That’s all you see on TV.

That these pampered ladies can’t easily get their nails done is not Afghanistan’s biggest problem. Nor is the closing of dance studios or fashion boutiques.

What really matters is that Afghan wedding parties and villages are no longer being savaged by US warplanes or B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers, or that wide scale torture by the Communist-run secret police, whose head, Amrullah Saleh, was a key US ally and the nation’s real strongmen, has been ended by Taliban.

Meanwhile, western media simply ignores the plight of women in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. I well recall being twice arrested in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by religious police for walking with an attractive lady (an Estee Lauder beauty consultant).

I was arrested in Kuwait under similar suspicion. I was whipped by Saudi airport security police. And yet all we hear about or see are films of wicked Taliban soldiers maltreating Afghan women.

What I really want to know is what happened to all the billions in drug money reaped by the US-backed regime in Kabul and its allied warlords? Where are the pallets of fresh US $100 bills flown in from Washington to finance the Kabul regime? We saw the same phenomena in US-occupied Iraq. These mountains of cash just went ‘walkabout,’ as the Aussies say. Americans and US Arab allies grabbed the majority of these missing funds.

Iraq and Afghanistan account for one of the biggest thefts of money in modern history. Much of this sordid story has been documented by the US government’s own anti-corruption agency, SIGAR, which has waged a valiant battle to combat crime in Afghanistan during the $2 trillion, two-decade war.

Many of the drug-dealing criminals have already bailed out of Afghanistan via a US/British/French airlift. Others, Taliban opponents, mostly Tajik and Uzbek gang bosses, have managed to gain refuge in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The most formidable opposition to Taliban came from the Tajik Northern Alliance in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. This US-allied group dominated the drug trade until run out of business by Taliban. Now it’s trying to rally with secret backing from France, India and the US.

China is playing a cautious game in Afghanistan. I was invited by Chinese military intelligence to Beijing in 1981 to ask me if Beijing should begin supplying arms to the Afghan Islamic anti-Soviet resistance, aka ‘mujahidin.’ This was the most momentous act in the growing China-Soviet split. No one in Washington seemed to see or understand it.

Forty years later, China is still wrestling with this problem. Beijing wants good relations with Taliban but is seriously scared by the notion of Islamic wild men who support freedom and independence for the Chinese-ruled Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan).

Meanwhile, the great American-Afghan money machine has ground to a halt as its produce is secreted away in US real estate and Swiss banks.

ericmargolis.com

In May 2003, Senator Joseph R Biden of Delaware gave evidence at a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on “Narco-terrorism: international drug trafficking and terrorism — a dangerous mix” and declared he had “spent a considerable portion of my life trying to figure out how to deal with the drug problem and international drug trafficking.” He said it had been decided in 2001 that Afghanistan was not again “to become the single largest opium producer in the world” but this had happened “in two short years.” He was rightly indignant that in regard to narcotics control the Bush administration “is doing a horrible job — and I want to make it clear, a horrible job — in Afghanistan.”

Mr Biden considered the opium problem in Afghanistan to be serious and a necessarily high priority on Washington’s agenda for the country’s future, but eighteen years later it is apparent that now-President Biden has put Afghanistan’s drugs on the back burner of U.S. policy as the Pentagon withdraws its troops after so many years of conflict, chaos, destruction and death. It is notable that when he delivered “Remarks on the Way Forward in Afghanistan” in April he did not make a single mention of poppies, opium, narcotics or anything else to do with Afghanistan’s booming drug industry. When he met with Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani in Washington on June 25, the White House Readout of what transpired was similarly bereft of reference to any drug problem in the country. But Afghanistan’s drug production is a large and growing international emergency.

The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Mr John Sopko, has identified eight High-Risk Areas for Afghanistan, ranging from “increasing insecurity” to the thriving “Illicit Narcotics Trade” about which he notes that “various U.S. government agencies have sought to address Afghanistan’s narcotics trade through interdiction and counterdrug law enforcement; opium-poppy eradication; alternative development programs aimed at creating licit livelihood opportunities; and the mobilization of Afghan political and institutional support, to little effect.” He warns that “The deleterious effects of the illicit narcotics trade in Afghanistan extend beyond health impacts. It also helps fund insurgents, foster corruption, and provoke criminal violence.”

Since 2002 the U.S. government (read taxpayer) has spent eight billion dollars in attempting to control Afghanistan’s drug production industry. Very few people can imagine what eight billion dollars looks like, but it is clear that it is a vast sum of money that has been utterly wasted because, as reported by Voice of America on 3 May, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime found that “opium cultivation in conflict-ridden Afghanistan increased by 37% in 2020 compared to the previous year, potentially producing an estimated 6,300 tons of opium.” The reasons for the drug surge are many, and include “corruption, instability, and insecurity caused by insurgency groups” but the basic causes are down at the field-production level, because employment opportunities are small in rural areas, there is no decent education (no matter what is claimed by Washington), and farmers have limited access to markets for their legal produce. This is all compounded by a “drastic reduction in rainfall that has caused levels of food and water scarcity across 25 provinces.”

It might be thought obvious that employment, education and marketing were of the greatest importance to rural communities, which the World Bank calculates are 74 per cent of the country’s population. But even if the planners did work this out, they didn’t succeed in doing anything about it, and it is understandable, as described evocatively in the New York Times in January, that so many farmers and other rural dwellers have turned to poppy growing and drug smuggling simply in order to survive.

Poppy farming is illegal in itself, of course, but the wider juridical, social and humanitarian problem is that criminals can make vast profits from the processing and sale of opium, morphine and heroin. In a region notorious for corruption there is little than can be done by any central government to alleviate criminal activity of such a lucrative nature — even if the government itself were not ridden with corrupt officials.

As the SIGAR records in his 2021 Report : “According to the latest Asia Foundation survey results, 85% of respondents in 2020 reported that corruption was a major problem in their daily life and 95% of respondents said corruption was a major problem in Afghanistan as a whole.” The place is a sink of sleaze and iniquity. After twenty years it remains a battlefield, with the Taliban undeniably in the ascendant. The New York Times reported that in the week 17-24 June “At least 123 Afghan security forces and 53 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in the past week. This last seven days saw a cascade of more than 50 districts, mostly in Afghanistan’s north, fall to the Taliban in a sweeping offensive . . .” But in the Oval Office on June 25, in an all-too-common display of public relations hype, President Ashraf Ghani declared that “Today, the Afghan Defence and Security Forces have retaken six districts, both in the south and the north. It’s showing our determination”.

On June 22 Deborah Lyons, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said that all major indicators for Afghanistan’s security and development looked “negative or stagnant” and that the “possible slide toward dire scenarios is undeniable”. And one of the direst scenarios is the drug scene, for there is evidence of a wider and even more serious threat. The BBC notes that “a new report . . . warns that Afghanistan is becoming a significant global producer of methamphetamine [known as crystal meth]. The country’s opium poppy fields are already the source of the majority of the world’s heroin, and now . . . the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction warns that crystal meth could eventually become just as big an industry.” Indeed it is prospering, because as reported in April, for example, “Indonesian police seize 2.5-ton haul of crystal meth shipped from Afghanistan.”

The Director of the Monitoring Centre warns that “The degree to which producers in a small corner of the country have adopted new technologies, and established methamphetamine production with a potential global impact, serves as a reminder of how dramatically drug markets can change over short periods of time. We are now starting to see signs that methamphetamine produced in Afghanistan is beginning to appear on the international market . . . a clear need exists now to consider how we respond to the threat posed by increasing methamphetamine production in Afghanistan, both to the country itself and to the international community.”

But there is no indication whatever that the administration in Washington or the limping government in Kabul are considering any response at all to the massive threat posed by meth addiction around the world. There is a grave international crisis looming, and its base is Afghanistan.

In 2003 President Biden declared he had “spent a considerable portion of my life trying to figure out how to deal with the drug problem and international drug trafficking.” He must now figure out how to deal with the approaching international drug crisis which is largely due to ineptitude on the part of U.S.-NATO countries that were intended to “create the space and lay the foundations for improvements in governance and socio-economic development for sustainable stability.”

US involvement in Afghanistan is the archetypal quagmire. Hundreds of thousands killed or maimed, trillions of dollars wasted, a failed state – despite American pretensions of nation-building, and a militant insurgency stronger than ever. Washington’s declared strategic objectives in Afghanistan have never been coherent or convincing even among Pentagon top brass. The initial justification of “avenging terrorism of 9/11” sounds threadbare.

The irony is that Washington first got involved in Afghanistan back in the late 1970s to inflict a “Vietnam scenario” on Soviet troops who were defending an allied government in Kabul. The Mujahideen fighters sponsored by the US and their Taliban outgrowth have gone on to make the country an even worse Vietnam scenario for Washington than it intended for Moscow.

Afghanistan is known as the “Graveyard of Empires” where the British suffered a blow to their imperial prowess, like the Soviets and now the Americans. The question is: why are the Americans seemingly stuck in Afghanistan, unable to extricate their forces? Part of the reason no doubt stems from the bureaucracy of war and the reliable profits for the military-industrial complex which stifles a clean break from what is otherwise a futile, never-ending, dead-end conflict.

Another, perhaps more potent, reason is the immensely lucrative business of global narcotics trafficking. This may well be the main reason for why the Afghan war continues despite the patent incongruities and presidential vows to end it. It is a vital source of finance for the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. The big advantage from drug business is that the finances are off the books, and therefore not subject to Congressional oversight. That “dark” source of income allows American agencies to fund covert operations without ever being held to account by prying lawmakers (if the latter ever got around to it, that is.)

Senior Russian and Iranian officials have recently stated that US intelligence agencies are heavily involved in covertly transporting narcotics out of Afghanistan.

According to Eskandar Momeni, Iran’s chief of counter-narcotics, the production of heroin from poppy harvests in Afghanistan has increased year after year by 50-fold since the US forces invaded the country. “Based on reliable information, planes operated by NATO and the United States transport these illicit drugs in our neighboring country,” the official testified this week.

Russia’s presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, is quoted as saying that CIA complicity in drug trafficking is “an open secret” in the country. “US intelligence officers… are involved in drug trafficking. Their planes from Kandahar, from Bagram [airfield near Kabul] are flying wherever they want to – to Germany, to Romania – without any inspections,” said Kabulov.

These claims put in perspective recent sensationalized US media reports which quote anonymous American intelligence sources alleging that Russian and Iranian military personnel were running “bounty-hunter” schemes in Afghanistan whereby Taliban militants were supposedly paid to kill American troops. The ropey US media reports had the hallmark of an intelligence psychological operation. Russia, Iran and the Taliban dismissed the allegations. Even the Pentagon and President Trump brushed the stories off as not credible.

But what the intended effect seems to have been is to scupper the hesitant moves by the Trump administration to wind down the Afghan war.

Afghanistan is the source for more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin supply, much of it destined for Europe, according to the United Nations. Some estimates put international drug trafficking as one of the most lucratively traded commodities, on par with oil and gas. Financial proceeds can be laundered through big banks as the scandal involving British bank HSBC illustrated.

For the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, Afghanistan is a giant money press from illicit drug dealing. That easy source for covert funding makes the Afghan war too addictive to kick the habit. With its clandestine global network, fleets of private planes, diplomatic clearance, national security license and byzantine bank accounts all those features make the CIA a perfect conduit for narcotics trafficking. In addition to means, the agency also has powerful motive for secret funding of its other criminal enterprises: media influence operations, color revolutions, assassinations and regime-change subversions.

The systematic involvement of the CIA in international drug running is as old as the agency itself, created in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Its function of covert operations is by definition illegal and therefore requires secret funding. The agency has been linked to illicit Nazi gold to fund its early operations. Later, narcotics trafficking entered as a crucial means for organizational funding. The Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia was central for sponsoring anti-communist schemes in the 1960 and 70s, as was Colombia and Central America for funding proxy forces like the Contra in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Afghanistan carries on this global function for underpinning the CIA’s criminal enterprises.