The Real Drug Lords - A Brief History Of The Afghan-CIA Heroin Ratline
A Middle Eastern country in cahoots with a sly American government agency when it comes to drug trafficking? The Afghanistan-CIA heroin ratline proves so.
Dec 12, 20171161 Shares18424 Views
Ever heard of the Afghanistan-CIA heroin ratline?
The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets.
Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline - with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational - is a trillion-dollar heroin money laundering operation.
In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the U.S.
Up to 93% of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan.
Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation.
The key questions - never asked by Atlanticist circles - are:
- Who buys the opium harvests?
- Who refines them into heroin?
- Who controls the export routes?
- Who sells them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes?
The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in “self-defense” after 9/11; installed a “democratic” government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.
Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction.
And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in “counternarcotics programs.”
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF; 2001-2014) - along with the “liberation” of Iraq - has cost an astonishing several trillion dollars.
And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives.
Cui bono?
Have A SIGAR
An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas.
According to the survey:
“„In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.- Afghanistan Opium Survey
Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints - discreetly - at the crucial connection: Operation Enduring Freedom feeding America’s heroin epidemic.
Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands.
Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline - in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of U.S. intel black ops that should not, by any means, come under scrutiny by the U.S. Congress.
A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the Pentagon-designated “arc of instability” tells the story of his interaction with an Australian intel operative who served in Afghanistan.
“This was about 2011," the intel said.
He revealed that he gave the U.S. Army Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the Afghan heroin trade: that U.S. military convoys from the ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin (much of it was raw opium) out of Afghanistan for distribution as their backhaul.
No one answered.
He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and the CIA at a meeting and asked why no action was taken.
The answer was that the goal of the U.S. was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving them the poppies to grow won their hearts.
He was then warned that if he brought this issue up again, he would be returned to Australia “in a body bag.”
The source is adamant but says:
“„CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to financetheir operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection.- from an intel
And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump’s going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge.
In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion-dollar heroin trade.
It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap.
The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless.
None of this deviate from the CIA’s modus operandi.
Past examples abound.
The most notorious concerns the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War (1954-1975), when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong people, an ethnic group from Laos - complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the set-up of nefarious Air America to export the opium.
The whole story was exposed in Prof. Alfred W. McCoy’s seminal, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), which drove Langley nuts.
A contemporary counterpart would be Afghanistan 2001-2016: La Nuova Guerra Dell’oppio (2016), a book by Italian journalist Enrico Piovesana detailing the New Opium War in Afghanistan.
The Return Of Air America
A Pakistani intel source with vast Pashtun/tribal area contacts delves into even more incendiary territory:
“„According to our best information, the CIA has brought in their al-Qaeda-Daesh proxies into Afghanistan to justify the additional American troops.- from a Pakistani intel
That would neatly tie in with Trump being cornered by his generals.
And then, there’s Moscow.
Last week, the Russian foreign ministry was adamantly denouncing “foreign fighters” transferred by “unknown helicopters” as the perpetrators of a massacre of Hazara Shi’ites in a northern Afghanistan province.
The foreign ministry said:
“„It seems that the command of the NATO forces controlling the Afghan sky stubbornly refuses to notice these incidents.- Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
It does not get more serious than that.
Moscow, denouncing sectors of the U.S.-trained Afghan Armed Forces side by side with NATO, engaged in covert ops supporting jihadis.
Russian intel has hinted - discreetly - for quite some time that U.S. intel is covertly sponsoring Daesh, a.k.a. ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K (or ISKP for Islamic State - Khorasan Province), in Afghanistan.
Russian intel is very much aware of the Afghan chapter in the New Great Game.
Russian citizens are “collateral damage” of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, “Italy, France, and the Netherlands,” and how the U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.
Well, Air America, after all, never died.
It just relocated from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the arid crossroads of Central and South Asia - and the Afghanistan-CIA heroin ratline continues to exist.
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