AFGHANISTAN: HIGH ON OPIUM, NOT DEMOCRACY

[ProSense]

AFGHANISTAN: HIGH ON OPIUM, NOT DEMOCRACY
Fri Sep 8, 6:49 AM ET

The good news, for drug fiends, is that Afghanistan has just harvested its biggest opium crop ever, up a whopping 59 percent from last year and big enough to cover 130 percent of the entire world market. The street price for illegal heroin, 92 percent of which now comes from Afghanistan, should be way down from Bangkok to London, and for those shooting up in the back alleys of Chicago. The bad news, for the rest of us, is that in Bush-liberated Afghanistan, billions in drug profits are financing the Taliban.

Remember them, the guys who harbored the al-Qaida terrorists, who gifted us with the 9-11 attacks five years ago, that President Bush promised to eliminate? Well, it turns out that while he was distracted with Iraq, the patrons of terrorism were very much in business back where the 9-11 attack was hatched, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state that provides a lucrative source of cash for the "evildoers" Bush forgot about.

The Bush administration has, for half a decade, celebrated its overthrow of the Taliban and subsequent national elections in Afghanistan, but if this is democratic nation-building then the model must be Colombia, the narco-state where the political process masks the real power held by drug lords and radical insurgents. Afghanistan is dominated not by the government in Kabul, but by a patchwork of warlords, terrorist groups and drug traffickers completely addicted to the annual poppy harvest's profits.

Snip...

In any case, reported the United Nations this week, "opium cultivation in Afghanistan is out of control" despite the expenditure of billions by the West to fight it. Intelligence estimates of the Taliban's cut of this lucrative trade, which represents over a third of the entire Afghan economy, range up to 70 percent, according to ABC News.

Snip...

Yet on Tuesday, the White House was once again trumpeting that "we have deprived al-Qaida of safe haven in Afghanistan and helped a democratic government rise in its place." Considering that Osama bin Laden himself is still reputed to be hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and Afghan President Hamid Karzai is desperately dependent on the support of drug lords and warlords to prevent renewed civil war, such claims are a blatant fraud.

more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20060908/cm_uc_crrscx/robert_scheer20060908

[seemslikeadream]

1. State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=610235

[Chemical Bill]

2. That's funny, the Taliban banned cultivation before 9/11. n/t