Well, okay... I did get a little bit of my spin on yesterday's part 5 post wrong. The more I continue reading about poppy growing in Afghanistan, the more I learn. What the bumper crop of this year's opium will create in the end-user markets isn't necessarily only a drop in the price. It will apparently also cause an increase in the purity of the heroin sold on the streets of western civilization. Here's an article from Scotland that went up yesterday...
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1300642006As the article cites in interviewing the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the last time the purity of street heroin went up (doubled, actually), was in 2004. This directly caused an increase of overdoses and deaths from overdoses, so this UN officer has issued a warning to that effect to the health ministries of "major heroin consuming nations"!
What really amazes me is how the UN has got this whole drug market so neatly analyzed, how they can so accurately obtain all this marketing information, and so forth. It's amazing to me that this worldwide illegal activity can be so transparent and observable on this scale. It's a black market, for chrissakes! Where are they getting all this information?
The more I learn about this, the more outraged I am by the blatant, in your face inconsistencies concerned with this whole thing, versus the so-called "war on drugs".
More and more, the one thing that stands out as the most glaring factor in the entire Afghanistan scenario is that the US government had been planning to go into that country BEFORE the 9/11 attacks. The only place that poppies were still being grown in Afghanstan prior to 9/11, and after the Taliban had successfully reduced Afghani opium production by 90%, was in areas controlled by the "northern alliance".
And who, exactly, did the invasion forces ally themselves to in taking over Afghanistan? The "northern alliance", that's who. They're the "pro-poppy-growing" group, the only group in Afghanistan that had this commodity still under production in that country, that's who.
It's as if the Osama Bin Laden bloc, the Taliban bloc, was pissing off the world-wide illegal drug traders by crippling the supply side of the market, so in order to fight back, the UN and the US and the UK went in there and chased them out. Immediately, the objective of recovering all that production was realized. One year later, Afghanistan is back on the world map as the number one producer of opium.
Mission Accomplished!
Yes, boys and girls, May 2, 2003 was the day that George W. Bush was flown to the USS Lincoln in a jet fighter, made a tail-hook landing on the aircraft carrier, and jumped out to announce, "Mission Accomplished!" It was only one day BEFORE that that Donald Rumsfeld met with Hamid Karzai (a former oil industry deal-maker, by the way) in Kabul. Concurrently, a senior US official travelling with Rumsfeld announced that the US was "moving out of major combat operations and... into reconstruction, stability and humanitarian relief operations."
The only thing that's REALLY been "stabilized" in that country so far has been the restoration of Afghanistan as the world's number one source of opium. The proof of the pudding is in the eating... this was the objective, this was the goal, and the mission was quickly accomplished. NOTHING of any import has been done in Afghanistan, ever since.
You tell me that there's something I'm missing in all of this, and I'll be more than willing to consider changing my tune here. Meanwhile, here's some links that'll describe things going on in the past to shed some light on how we got to this point, and to get you in the mood...
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2005/090605mexicancommandos.htmhttp://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/053101_Citigroupandasa.htmlhttp://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/bush-cheney-drugs.htmlThe credibility and veracity of such fringe "information" is always in question, of course, and I'd be the first to admit that it's terribly unscientific, or perhaps evidence of my lack of objectivity, which drives my posts regarding Afghanistan's opium production. I just don't buy the PR that dubya's just a dumb hick, however, and any explanation including the word "bungled" won't wash at this point.
The three links, above, describe things going all the way back into the 1970's, and are full of all sorts of other outside links. You could easily spend the next couple of months sifting through this kind of stuff. I've been sifting through these types of things for much longer, however, as evidenced by various posts I've made over the past year. I don't take such things, individually, at face value, I take them with great skepticism. But when subsequent, long term events tend to bear out any substance to various claims and allegations made by these "fringe" sources, I find it difficult to continue dismissing them out of hand.
You want a "smoking gun"? Just look at what's been caused to happen in Afghanistan. This is no accident, this is no "bungled job", this is no ancillary effect. This is the main event, the intended result. To look at it in any other way is to not look at it at all.
