Afghan Triangle: Opium, Oil and Taliban
By A Khokar • Aug 2nd, 2009 • Category: Politics, Worth A Second Look • One ResponseOn July 4, 2009 – authorities in New York made heroin bust with a street value of US$33 million and arrested 12 people, who were using Build-A-Bear dolls packed with drug as their distribution network. They also seized US$150,000 in cash – Daily News , July 5, 2009. Source of heroin was Afghanistan.
After humiliating the Red Army in Afghanistan and making Uncle Sam the sole world power – The Mujahideen Islamist leaders fell from the favour of America and its proxy governments in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – in the fear that they might establish an Iran-friendly Islamic regime in Kabul. Therefore, a new group based on Saudi-version of Islamic state was given birth by CIA, ISI and Riyadh, which with the active help from Pakistan Air Force – forced two prominent Mujahideed leaders, Afghan President Rabbani and Afghan Prime Minister Gulbedin, to seek refuge in Iran in 1996. These two leaders were treated like foreign dignatories till the Taliban were ousted from power by their former midwife, the US.
The 9/11 was used as an excuse to make devil out of Taliban and their guest Osama Bin Laden. Both were blamed for 9/11 – though Taliban in their six-year-rule, did not had a single commercial or military plane or modern telecommunication network – but they were able to pull-out the greatest terror attack on American soil.
And how evil Taliban were – a Zionist Jew writer, Eben Kaplan, wrote in the journal of the most powerful Zionist think tank, ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ (it’s reported that 400 of its members including its Jew president Richard Haass, Hilary Clinton and Dennis Ross are part of Obama’s administration) under the title The Taliban in Afghanistan, on July 2, 2008:
“Public reaction to Taliban’s rule was not wholly negative. While the rigid social standards (Wahhabism) fostered resentment, the Taliban cracked down on corruption that had run rampant through the government for years. The new leaders also brought stability to Afghanistan, greatly reducing the infighting between warlords that had devastated the civilian population. Seven year after their ouster, the Taliban continue to provide a semblance of stability in regions where coalition and government officials have been unable to restore order and provide basic services……”
Richard Haass, president CFR, who is also a senior adviser to Obama on foreign policy – has never criticized Zionist-regime’s “thugocracy” against all its Arab neighbours – has in his June 26 interview with Bernard Gwertzman said: “The Iranian theocracy has become a “thugocracy” (having defeated the “Zion Revolution” in the aftermath of Ahmadinejad’s huge victory) – but the Iranian regime will likely prevail because of its use of force against the population. This makes the urgency of negotiating an end to country’s nuclear program more pronounced, and possibly more difficult. Iranian challenge (to Israel) still exists, and may actually be somewhat worse…..”
So the question comes to mind is: why occupy Afghanistan when the leaders of both Afghan Mujahideen and Taliban were pro-America? The answer lies in the planning of the pro-Israel high-ranking officials in Clinton and Bush administrations – long before September 11, 2001 tragedy. The planned occupation of Afghanistan was based on two factors of greed - the Caspian Sea oil reserves and Taliban’s ban on Poppy cultivation - the source of US$600 billion opium business in 2007 (second to oil and arms trade).
Taliban, on several occasions, offered to turn over Osama Bin Laden to a third country for trail, once Washington and Jewish media blamed him for masterminding the 9/11 – However, both Clinton and Bush administrations rejected those offers.
American puppet regimes were nededed both in Afghanistan and Pakistan to built the cheapest oil pipeline from Caspian Sea to Gwader port in Balochistan via Afghanistan.Furthermore, both these countries are itself rich in oil/gas and other natural resources: “Massive untapped gas reserves are believed to be lying beneath Pakistan’s remotest deserts, but they’re being held hostage by armed tribal groups demanding a better deal from the central government,” – AFP, September 1, 2001.
Taliban’s eradication program led to a 94% decline in opium cultivation by 2000. According to UN’s 2001 figures, opium cultivation had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately, following US occupation in December 2001 – production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels – 6,100 tons in 2006 (a 3200% increase in five years).
And who are the greatest beneficiaries of opium cultivated in Afghanistan, India and the rest of Far East countries – David Sassoon (1792-1864) and his family of course. Historically, Rothschild-controlled Britain won Hong Kong by launching the Opium Wars to give the Sassoons exclusive rights to drug an entire nation! According to the 1944 Jewish Encyclopedia: “He (David Sassoon) employed only Jews in his business, and wherever he sent them he built Synagouges and schools for them. He imported whole family of fellow Jews…and put them to work.”
Arnold Rothstein was known as the American Drug Kingpin.
In order to keep a steady and secure flow of oil and opium – a powerful army is needed – and that’s where the Arms Industry and NATO fits in. And let us not forget the “intelligence mafia” which keep the terrorism hoax alive – such as CIA, MI6, RAW, SVR, and MOSSAD. Source: Rehmat World
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In February 2001 U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan — once the world’s largest producer — since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation’s largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
“We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,” said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier — a sea of blood-red poppies.
A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.
Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world’s supply, U.N. officials said. Opium — the milky substance drained from the poppy plant — is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 1999 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said — more than all other countries combined, including the “Golden Triangle,” where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.
The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.
The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others — areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.
This year they found poppies growing on barely an acre here and there, Frahi said. The rest — about 175,000 acres — was clean.
“We have to look at the situation with careful optimism,” said Sandro Tucci of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna, Austria.
He said indications are that no poppies were planted this season and that, as a result, there hasn’t been any production of opium — but that officials would keep checking.
The State Department counternarcotics official said the department would make its own estimate of the poppy crop. Information received so far suggests there will be a decrease, but how much is not yet clear, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We do not think by any stretch of the imagination that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been eliminated. But we, like the rest of the world, welcome positive news.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration declined to comment.
No U.S. government official can enter Afghanistan because of security concerns stemming from the presence of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Poppies are harvested in March and April, which is why the survey was done now. Tucci said it would have been impossible for the poppies to have been harvested already.
The areas searched by the U.N. surveyors are the most fertile lands under Taliban control. Other areas, though they are somewhat fertile, have not traditionally been poppy growing areas and farmers are struggling to raise any crops at all because of severe drought. The rest of the land held by the Taliban is mountainous or desert, where poppies could not grow.
Karim Rahimi, the U.N. drug control liaison in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, said farmers were growing wheat or onions in fields where they once grew poppies.
“It is amazing, really, when you see the fields that last year were filled with poppies and this year there is wheat,” he said.
The Taliban enforced the ban by threatening to arrest village elders and mullahs who allowed poppies to be grown. Taliban soldiers patrolled in trucks armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. About 1,000 people in Nangarhar who tried to defy the ban were arrested and jailed until they agreed to destroy their crops.
Signs throughout Nangarhar warn against drug production and use, some calling it an “illicit phenomenon.” Another reads: “Be drug free, be happy.”
Last year, poppies grew on 12,600 acres of land in Nangarhar province. According to the U.N. survey, poppies were planted on only 17 acres there this season and all were destroyed by the Taliban.
“The Taliban have done their work very seriously,” Frahi said.
But the ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world’s poorest countries, shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought.
Ahmed Rehman, who shares less than three acres in Nangarhar with his three brothers, said the opium he produced last year on part of the land brought him $1,100.
This year, he says, he will be lucky to get $300 for the onions and cattle feed he planted on the entire parcel.
“Life is very bad for me this year,” he said. “Last year I was able to buy meat and wheat and now this year there is nothing.”
But Rehman said he never considered defying the ban.
“The Taliban were patrolling all the time. Of course I was afraid. I did not want to go to jail and lose my freedom and my dignity,” he said, gesturing with dirt-caked hands.
Shams-ul-Haq Sayed, an officer of the Taliban drug control office in Jalalabad, said farmers need international aid.
“This year was the most important for us because growing poppies was part of their culture, and the first years are always the most difficult,” he said.
Tucci said discussions are under way on how to help the farmers.
Western diplomats in Pakistan have suggested the Taliban is simply trying to drive up the price of opium they have stockpiled. The State Department official also said Afghanistan could do more by destroying drug stockpiles and heroin labs and arresting producers and traffickers.
Frahi dismissed that as “nonsense” and said it is drug traffickers and shopkeepers who have stockpiles. Two pounds of opium worth $35 last year are now worth as much as $360, he said.
Mullah Amir Mohammed Haqqani, the Taliban’s top drug official in Nangarhar, said the ban would remain regardless of whether the Taliban received aid or international recognition.
“It is our decree that there will be no poppy cultivation. It is banned forever in this country,” he said. “Whether we get assistance or not, poppy growing will never be allowed again in our country.
http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html