The CIA is usually used to doling out pain. From its HQ in Langley (Virginia/Washington) it controls some of the Predators, though there is increasing evidence that General McChrystal may be using the Reapers to attack positions in Pakistan. The CIA/Xe has also been carrying on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the first time that the militants have attacked the CIA post in Khost, which is just across the border from Pakistan. The news reports are calling it “CIAs Pearl Harbor“, “tremendous talent lost”. A CIA operative is very valuable to the US, because it takes years to build a productive operative which banks on a network of spies. This attack clearly disrupts the CIAs drone operations and will surely encourage the Taliban in increasing such attacks.
“The impact can be huge, not just in terms of the capabilities of these particular people, but in the relationships that they themselves have built,” he said.
“You can’t simply go pick up five or 10 more of these guys. They may be the best guys in the world at what they do and they’re gone,” he said.
The attack comes as the United States increasingly relies on the CIA and other covert forces to pursue strategic goals. CIA and special forces were at the forefront of the US invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, paving the way to overthrow the Taliban’s extremist regime.
More recently — and controversially — the CIA has been operating unmanned drones that target extremists in lawless areas of Pakistan.
Intelligence operatives are also seen as crucial in laying out the groundwork as Obama and NATO allies send in another 36,800 troops as part of a surge expected to last until late 2010.
Thomas M. Sanderson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has studied terrorist groups for the US intelligence community, said the attack could alter the mindset of operatives on the ground.
“It’s highly problematic because it just makes everyone there be very suspicious of every Afghan who comes their way. Trust is going to take a hit,” Sanderson said. AFP
The Washington Post has reported that this attack represents a major blow to CIA operations in Afghanistan and the deadliest in the agencies history.
“There was some tremendous talent lost,” a former intelligence official said. A U.S. military spokesman said none of the dead in the attack on Forward Operating Base Chapman, a U.S. military installation in the southeastern province of Khost, were soldiers.
Some of the deaths could be contractors or other civilians. If it turns out all eight deaths were CIA officers, it would be the equivalent of “Pearl Harbor for the agency,” the former intelligence official said. Wall Street Journal.
Will this force the CIA to move back or curtail its operations?
Shirak-e-Mazar, the milk of Mazar, is what got Charlie through his deployment in Afghanistan. Shirak-e-Mazar is what Afghanis call the paper-thin sheets of hashish that sell for about $1.50 an ounce. It’s a 5000-year-old recipe, perfected in the Mazar-e-Sharif region, for preparing the compressed resin glands of the marijuana plant, and unless things have changed since Charlie left Afghanistan in 2004, it’s available, well, just about everywhere.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told the BBC the Khost bomber was wearing an army uniform when he managed to breach security at the base, detonating his explosives belt in the gym. BBC
A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency’s history, U.S. officials said.
The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted — Forward Operating Base Chapman — is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda’s home base.
Times on line discusses CIAs dirty war.
The deaths of seven CIA agents in Khost province have brought into the limelight the secretive and dirty war being fought by America’s intelligence agencies — and the Taleban and al-Qaeda — in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Forward Operating Base Chapman, and others like it along the border, are the forward edge of American military and intelligence counter-terrorism operations, aimed principally at hunting down senior figures in al-Qaeda and their allies in the Taleban hiding in the lawless tribal belt.
?
The attack at the C.I.A. base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost Province appeared to be the single deadliest episode for the spy agency in the eight years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It also dealt a significant blow to the often insular, tight-knit organization, which has lost only 90 officers in the line of duty since its founding in 1947.
The CIA’s main strike weapons are the drones that loiter over the border areas 24 hours a day, watching and listening to telephone networks. While the drones provide surveillance and electronic intelligence and carry out strikes, human intelligence is far harder to acquire among remote communities suspicious of any outside. From The Times, January 1, 2010, CIA caught in dirty and secretive war against al-Qaeda on Afghan border, Tom Coghlan: analysis
The BBC adds the following:
Reports say the Chapman base is used by provincial reconstruction teams – which include soldiers and civilians – and is protected by some 200 Afghan soldiers.
The base has been described as “not regular” – a phrase that implies it was a centre of CIA operations in Khost province, the BBC’s Peter Greste in Kabul says.
Shireen Mazari in “The Nation” gives the Americans the following adivce “Under the circumstances, the US must pack up and leave. It must seriously consider the prescription offered by Newsweek, which has urged the Obama Administration to concede defeat and withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Absurdities like more boots on the ground rather than acting as a palliative would exacerbate the malady”. The attack is the symptom of a greater malady–the profound errors in America’s new policy in Afghanistan. The entire “Surge and Exit” is based on the Afghan component. This attack and others like it show how hollow the entire premise is. It is obvious that the Afghans want America to leave. When will the CIA get the message? Mr. Obama should declare victory and leave Afghanistan.
CIA manual of trickery and deception psy ops Sabotage Manual
U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.
It is unclear exactly how the assailant managed to gain access to the heavily guarded U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA. The bomber struck in what one U.S. official described as the base’s fitness center.
A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack and said the bomber was “an Afghan National Army officer wearing a suicide vest,” the Associated Press reported.
That description could not be confirmed with U.S. or Afghan military officials. But a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there are Afghan national security forces posted at the base.
In addition to the dead, eight people were wounded in the attack, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.
While many details remained vague Wednesday, the attack appears to have killed more U.S. intelligence personnel than have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in late 2001. The CIA has previously acknowledged the deaths of four officers in fighting in Afghanistan in the past eight years.
“It is the nightmare we’ve been anticipating since we went into Afghanistan and Iraq,” said John E. McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director who now serves on a board that supports children of CIA officers slain on the job. “Our people are often out on the front line, without adequate force protection, and they put their lives quite literally in jeopardy.”
Kandahar, Zabul, Hilmand, Orazgan Nooristan & Kunar. According to an ISoC report the US faces total collapse in Afghanistan. This is a map of Talibanistan: 2009 Afghan map showing Taliban control
The CIA has declined to comment publicly on the attack until relatives of the dead are notified. A former senior agency official said it was the worst single-day casualty toll for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983.
“I know that the American people will appreciate their sacrifice. I pray that the government they serve does the same,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because the agency has not yet publicly acknowledged the deaths.
The CIA has been quietly bolstering its ranks in Afghanistan in recent weeks, mirroring the surge of military troops there. Agency officers coordinated the initial U.S.-led attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, and have since provided hundreds of spies, paramilitary operatives and analysts in the region for roles ranging from counterterrorism to counternarcotics. The agency also operates the remote-control aircraft used in aerial strikes on suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the lawless tribal provinces on the Pakistan side of the border. The campaign of strikes in Pakistan has not been officially acknowledged, but it has escalated rapidly in the past two years.
Intelligence experts who have visited U.S. bases in the region say the CIA officers at Chapman would have focused mainly on recruiting local operatives and identifying targets.
CIA Manual--Psy Ops. Intelligence Sabotage manual
“The best intelligence is going to come from the field, and that means working closely with the Afghans,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
The loss of experienced CIA field officers would be particularly damaging to U.S. efforts in the area “because they know the terrain,” Hoffman said. “Every American death in a theater of war is tragic, but these might be more consequential given these officers’ unique capabilities and attributes.”
The bomber and those who aided him must have had very good intelligence to gain access to the secure base without arousing suspicion, he said.
Ninety CIA deaths are memorialized by stars on a wall in the agency’s Langley headquarters. The inscription on the memorial reads: “We are the nation’s first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.”
U.S. military officials and diplomats confirmed Wednesday’s attack and the eight civilian deaths. “We mourn the loss of life in this attack,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.
The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan this year has reached 310, the highest one-year total since the start of the war. Twelve U.S. troops have been killed since Dec. 1.
There have been persistent reports that the CIA tolerates or is actively involved in the drug trade--supporting and protecting the drug lords in Afghanistan
Khost has been the scene of several major attacks this year. In May, an attack killed 13 civilians and injured 36 others. Seven Afghan civilians were killed and 21 were wounded by an improvised explosive device detonated outside the main gate of Forward Operating Base Salerno on May 13.
Also Wednesday, NATO announced that four Canadian troops and a journalist from Canada were killed in an explosion in Kandahar province, one of the most dangerous areas of southern Afghanistan.
The international coalition said the journalist was traveling with the troops on a patrol near Kandahar city when they were attacked Wednesday.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for that blast as well, AP reported.
The loss of the operatives in Afghanistan is seen a tremendous blow to the agencies operations in Afghanistan and may lead to the loss of many other spies who will be left out as orphans.
The attack was an audacious blow to US counterterrorism operations, killing intelligence workers whose jobs involved plotting strikes against the Taliban.. The Age
“India supporting the terrorists in tribal areas & Balochistan” FM Qureshi 
India’s dark shadow on Afghanistan 
Evidence against India-ISI Chief confronts Leon Panetta about stopping CIA/RAW Terror in Pakistan
The loss of the CIA Chief is a huge loss for the Agency:
The only victim of the attack who has been publicly identified is 37-year-old Harold Brown Jr., a father of three. The base chief, a woman in her 30s, was also killed, according to current and former intelligence officials. She is believed to have been focused on al Qaeda since before 9/11. A former U.S. official says a second woman was also killed in the attack, and that both women had “considerable counterintelligence experience.”
The attack also killed Captain Al Shareef Ali bin Zeid, a member of the Jordanian spy agency Dairat al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah, according to people who have spoken with bin Zeid’s family. The Jordanian military released a statement acknowledging bin Zeid had been killed in Afghanistan, but did not mention he was working with the CIA.
“This is a tremendous loss for the agency,” says Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who led the bin Laden unit. “The agency is a relatively small organization, and its expertise in al Qaeda is even a smaller subset of that overall group.”
At least 13 officers gathered in the base’s gym to talk with the informant, suggesting he was highly valued. His prior visits to the base and his ability to get so close to so many officers also suggests that he had already provided the agency with valuable intelligence that had proven successful, former intelligence officials say. ABC News
The decimation of the base in Khost has long term consequence for the spy agency. This attack tells the CIA that they are not safe, and the blowback can be deadly.
Kandahar is a hotbed of the insurgency. On Dec. 24, eight people, including a child, were killed when a man driving a horse-drawn cart laden with explosives detonated the cache outside a guesthouse frequented by foreigners. The day before, another Canadian soldier was killed by a homemade bomb in the province.
The US Army and specially the CIA works closely with the war lords that grow and export drugs to Europe and the US. There are some reports that claim that the attack on the CIA operations was a drug hit
According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, the latest casualties bring to 32 the number of Canadian forces killed in Afghanistan this year.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai “strongly condemned” the attack, according to a statement issued by his office.
“President Karzai shares the grief and extends prayers and deepest condolences to families and friends of the victims and to the people of the United States and Canada,” the statement said. It quoted Karzai as saying: “Your sons and daughters have lost their lives for protecting the Afghan people and the humanity against the threat of terrorism. Afghans will never forget your sacrifices.”
The Army drug connection has not been covered in depth
Staff writers Karin Brulliard in Islamabad and Karen DeYoung, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report. Suicide bomber attacks CIA base in Afghanistan, killing at least 8 Americans, By Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, December 31, 2009; 8:34 AM
This is not the first time an Afghan security official has turned on coalition forces.
Last March, an Afghan soldier shot dead two US troops, wounded a third and then turned the gun on himself. And in November, a policeman killed five British soldiers in Helmand.
Those breaches of security will raise new questions about the capacity of the Afghan authorities to screen recruits as they struggle to increase numbers and take over the war from coalition forces.
At the same time, the coalition is dramatically ramping up numbers of both military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan, in line with President Obama’s surge.
This latest attack exposes the risks inherent in both elements of that strategy. BBC. Peter Greste, Kabul
This completes the circle of life, when the “Taliban” created by the CIA have now turned upon the creator. This is what Shireen Mazari in the Nation says.
Though Mr. Haqqani is much hated by the current White House and wants him killed, previous White House under President Reagan invited him and praised him
Specifically, for the CIA, which effectively trained and funded the Mujahideen back in the 80s, the genie is now out of the bottle and is haunting them. The Americans and their intelligence establishment are reaping the whirlwind of a terrible and deadly legacy they had once sown in the hope that it would not affect them. In a phenomenon that is fast becoming a trend in Afghanistan, a sympathiser from the Afghan army carried out the attack. It would definitely add to NATO’s worry because it is the Afghan army personnel, who provide security to the foreign armies. This also shows the general hatred towards the US and its cohorts in Afghanistan. It is not just a particular group like the Taliban who want the Americans out but the ordinary Afghans as well who loathe their very presence.
The Taliban was a construct of the CIA and was armed by the CIA:–Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
The CIA is facing an increasing onslaught from the militants in Afghanistan.
Also Thursday, Afghan police said militants beheaded six Afghans for cooperating with government authorities. Juma Gul Hamit, police chief of Uruzgan province in south-central Afghanistan, said the men were beheaded near the provincial capital of Tarin Kot. He says a seventh Afghan man is being treated for serious neck injuries.
According to a military official who works on Afghan issues, Chapman has grown substantially in recent months and is a base for both military and intelligence operations. Because of its size, the officer said, the suicide bomber is likely to have been able to penetrate multiple layers of security before detonating the explosives.
The attack came on a day of deepening dispute between Western and Afghan authorities over whether an international raid earlier this week had killed Afghan civilians, including children. Wall Street Journal
The attack on the CIA comes in the wake of serious differences between the US and both of its allies–Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hamid Karzia last week condemned the US operations which were responsible for the loss of civilians in Afghanistan. Many in Pakistan think that the CIA is responsible for attacks on Pakistani civilians “to convince the Pakistanis” to attack the people that the US considers evil. It is pedagogical to read the story about the meeting between the CIA Ahief Paneta and General Pasha, the head of the Pakistani ISI.
ISLAMABAD – Serious differences are understood to have cropped up between Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency ISI and US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over the latter’s dismal role in countering terrorism in Pakistan, TheNation reliably learnt on Friday.
The sources said that General Pasha was critical to the CIA’s counter-terrorism strategy in Afghanistan and CIA’s failure to provide concrete actionable information to Pakistan in containing flow of aid to terror networks operating from Afghanistan to destabilize Pakistan.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley describes the CIA's involvement in drugs in Afghanistan
The monograph on the CIAs involvement in drugs has been well documented. This is how Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley describes it.
The social costs of this drug-assisted war are still with us: there are said, for example, to be now five million heroin addicts in Pakistan alone. And yet America in 2001 decided to do it again: to try, with the assistance of drug traffickers, to impose nation-building on a quasi-state with at least a dozen major ethnic groups speaking unrelated languages. In a close analogy to the use of the Hmong in Laos, America initiated its Afghan campaign in 2001 in concert with a distinct minority, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. In a closer analogy still, the CIA in 2000 (in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency) chose as its principal ally Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, despite the objection of other national security advisers that “Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established a permanent base [with him] in the Panjshir, it risked entanglement with the heroin trade.”[41]
There was no ambiguity about the U.S. intention to use drug traffickers to initiate its ground position in Afghanistan. The CIA mounted its coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even importing drug traffickers, usually old assets from the 1980s. An example was Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon in France, whom “British and American officials… met with and persuaded… to return to Afghanistan.”[42]
In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S. intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug syndicates. With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled, from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007.
Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the conventional wisdom on this matter:
Partly this has been from realpolitik – in recognition of the local power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound (as the U.S. is) by the rules of war… These facts… have led to enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks, particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and indeed the whole of US society.[43]
Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated “that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks.”[44] The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”[45]
Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug traffic.
As Senator Levin summarizes the record: “Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated half of that money comes to the United States”…
Washington and the mass media have portrayed the U.S. in the forefront of the struggle against narco trafficking, drug laundering and political corruption: the image is of clean white hands fighting dirty money from the Third world (or the ex-Communist countries). The truth is exactly the opposite. U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those funds in legitimate businesses or U.S. government bonds and legitimating them. The U.S. Congress has held numerous hearings, provided detailed exposés of the illicit practices of the banks, passed several laws and called for stiffer enforcement by any number of public regulators and private bankers. Yet the biggest banks continue their practices, the sums of dirty money grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.[46]
In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this analysis found support from the claim of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result… Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.[47]
Why This Drug-Corrupted War Will Continue
Thus the war machine that co-opted Obama into his incipient escalations of an unwinnable war is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington. It is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in our society. For this reason the war machine will not be dissuaded by sensible advice from within the establishment, such as the recommendation for Afghan counterterrorism from the RAND Corporation:
Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa’ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.[48]
It will not be dissuaded by the conclusion of a recent study for the Carnegie Endowment that “the presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.”[49] To justify its global strategic posture of what it calls “full-spectrum dominance,” the Pentagon badly needs the “war against terror” in Afghanistan, just as a decade ago it needed the counter-productive “war against drugs” in Colombia.
Full-spectrum dominance is of course not just an end in itself, it is also lobbied for by far-flung American corporations overseas, especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil with huge investments in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. As Michael Klare noted in his book Resource Wars, a secondary objective of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was “to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil.”[50]
The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the protracted conflict generated by “full-spectrum dominance” in Afghanistan, and some of the beneficiaries may have been secretly lobbying for it. And I fear that all the client intelligence assets organized about the movement of Afghan heroin through Central Asia and beyond will, without a clear change in policy, continue as before to be protected by the CIA. And America’s superbanks like Citibank – the banks allegedly “too big to fail” – are now since the downturn even more dependant than before on the hundreds of billions of illicit profits which they launder each year.[51]
In both Afghanistan and Laos (as opposed to Vietnam) heroin has been by far the principal export, and so important that simply to curtail the production of opium has risked impoverishing those in the areas where opium was grown. This was the reason given for not disrupting heroin flows in the severe winter of 2001-02, the first year of the American invasion of Afghanistan. The economy was so devastated that, without income from opium, large numbers of Afghans might have starved.
According to Australian journalist Michael Ware, Time Magazine’s correspondent in Kandahar, opium is still the main support of the Afghan economy, as well the main support for both the Karzai government and the Taliban opposition:
You take away the opium and you suck the oxygen out of this economy and you’ll be treading on the toes of significant players who have built empires around the opium trade, and that includes political and military figures as well as criminal and business figures here in Kandahar.[52]
A consistent bias of U.S. news reporting on opium and heroin in Afghanistan has been to blame the Taliban for their production, and not also the government. For example, the New York Times reported on November 27, 2008 that
“Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office [UNODC], says.”[53]
But as Jeremy Hammond responds,
In commentary attached to the UNODC report, Mr. Costa asks, “Who collects this money? Local strong men. In other words, by year end, war-lords, drug-lords and insurgents will have extracted almost half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production and trafficking.” Notably, Mr. Costa does not answer his question with “the Taliban”, but includes a much broader range of participants who profit from the trade that includes, but is in no way limited to, the Taliban.[54]
Citing the statistics in the UNODC’s annual reports, Hammond estimates that the reported Taliban revenues from opium ($75-100 million) are only about 3 percent of the total earned income in Afghanistan ($3.4 billion), which in turn is only about five percent of the UNODC estimate of what that crop is worth in the world market ($64 billion).[55]
It is because of the larger share of drug profits going to supporters of the Kabul government that U.S. strategies to attack the Afghan drug trade are explicitly limited to attacking drug traffickers supporting the Taliban.[56] Such strategies have the indirect effect of increasing the opium market share of the past and present CIA assets in the Karzai regime (headed by Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset),[57] such as the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, an active CIA asset, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former CIA asset.[58]
As I have observed elsewhere about the U.S. campaign against the FARC and cocaine in Colombia, the aim of all U.S. anti drug campaigns abroad has never been the hopeless ideal of eradication. The aim of all such campaigns has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the state security apparatus and/or the CIA. This was notably true of Laos in the 1960s, when the CIA intervened militarily with air support to assist Ouan Rattikone’s army, in a battle over a contested opium caravan in Laos.[59]
Consequences for America of a Drug-Corrupted War
But this toleration of the traffic has led to another similarity with Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s: the increasing addiction of GIs to heroin, Afghanistan’s principal export. Despite the denial one has come to expect from high places, it is (according to Salon’s Shaun McCanna), not difficult to find a soldier who has returned from Afghanistan with an addiction. Nearly every veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom I have spoken with was familiar with heroin’s availability on base, and most knew at least one soldier who used while deployed.[60]
And the reported easy availability of heroin outside Afghanistan’s Bagram air base, like that four decades ago outside Vietnam’s American base at Long Binh, points to another alarming similarity. Just as at the height of the Vietnam war, heroin was shipped to the United States in body bags containing cadavers,[61] so now we hear from Heneral Mahmut Gareev, a former Soviet commander in Afghanistan that Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year – which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.[62]
Gareev’s charge has been repeated in one form or another by a number of other sources, including Pakistani General Hamid Gul, a former ISI commander:
“Abdul Wali Karzai is the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan,” he stated bluntly. He added that the drug lords are also involved in arms trafficking, which is “a flourishing trade” in Afghanistan. “But what is most disturbing from my point of view is that the military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being used. You said very rightly that the drug routes are northward through the Central Asia republics and through some of the Russian territory, and then into Europe and beyond. But some of it is going directly. That is by the military aircraft. I have so many times in my interviews said, ‘Please listen to this information, because I am an aware person.’ We have Afghans still in Pakistan, and they sometimes contact and pass on the stories to me. And some of them are very authentic. I can judge that. So they are saying that the American military aircraft are being used for this purpose. So, if that is true, it is very, very disturbing indeed.”[63]
Another slightly different testimony is from General Khodaidad Khodaidad, the current Afghan minister of counter narcotics:
The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan. General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, IRNA reported on Saturday. He went on to say that NATO forces are taxing the production of opium in the regions under their control.[64]
I do not accept these charges as proven, despite the number of additional sources for them. None of the sources quoted here can be considered an objective source with no axe to grind, and worse charges still are easy to find in wilds of the Internet.
However the charges are plausible, because of history. Just as in Vietnam and Laos, the United States made its initial alliances in Afghanistan with drug traffickers, both in 1980 and again in 2001; and this is a major factor explaining the endemic corruption of the U.S.-sponsored Karzai regime today. There should be an official Congressional investigation whether the United States did not intend for its Afghan assets, just as earlier in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, to supplement their CIA subsidies with income from drug trafficking.
In short, the impasse the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, in its efforts to support an unpopular and corrupt regime, must be understood in the light of its past relations to the drug traffic there – a situation which resembles the past U.S. involvement in Laos even more than in Vietnam. It is this sustained pattern of intervention in support of drug economies, and with the support of drug traffickers, that so depresses observers who had hoped desperately that, in this respect, Obama would bring a change.
The question remains: how many Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis will have to die, before we can put an end to this drug-corrupted and drug-corrupting war?
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16713
Obama’s “Vietnam”: Khyber & Hindu Kush
Afghanistan:– Pakistan’s Eminent Domain 
