Lame Excuses: WaPo’s Afghanistan Papers

The “Afghanistan Papers” scam by The Washington Post is an exercise in Hanlon’s Razor skulduggery. It represents an outright fabrication, a false narrative of “controversy,” packaged in the guise of classified information.

The papers follow the same template of deception that was used in destroying Sudan’s pharmaceutical industry, as well as 9/11. It hollowly rationalizes revelation of earth-shattering criminality by using complex but ridiculous narratives about “bad intelligence” and a “lack of coherent strategy.”

It’s really about enforcing the establishment line and disguising it as editorial criticism. Real crimes are ignored whilst smaller, simpler “well-intentioned mistakes” are reluctantly acknowledged.

Nowhere in the papers is the illegality of the Afghan invasion addressed. No actual person is accused of war crimes. The word “opium” is not even acknowledged,” which is bad enough.

Here are key data points for those living in the non-cartoon world. The Taliban banned the production of heroin in 2001 (just before the invasion). It dropped to almost nothing by the end of the year.

The Afghan government’s drug eradication program was repealed as soon as NATO troops arrived on the scene.

In the years that followed, Afghanistan’s opium production reached astronomical levels. Today, it produces 90% of global heroin. All this, we are told, happened while the most powerful military force on the planet desperately tried to stop it. The Taliban did in six months what the U.S. army has been unable to do in 18 years. Instead, production has grown 400%.

Farm areas allocated to opium are of the order of 328,000 hectares. Approximately half of the opium is processed into heroin within Afghanistan.

It’s hard to believe that a region under full U.S. military occupation -– with guard posts and surveillance drones monitoring the mountains of Tora Bora –- are able grow, process and ship supplies of opium.

In the words of researcher Timothy Alexander Guzman, “Who owns the planes and the ships that transport 90% percent of the world’s heroin from Afghanistan to the rest of the world in the first place? It sure isn’t the Taliban.”

Do we look like we have stupid written all over our faces?

Control of the world’s opium industry is a vital force in the operations of the intelligence agencies and organized-crime syndicates. It’s essentially reverse money-laundering, turning taxpayer funds into dark money that can be spent hiring mercenaries, organizing assassinations, arranging coups, or simply “stolen.”

And who knows how many hired mercenaries and American troops from the Afghan theater were involved in the drug trade back in the “homeland” as corrupt or captured officials.

They have access to all the “radicalized” young men they could ever want. These cutout “terrorists” can be renamed, trained and sent off to fight proxy wars in Syria or to spread fear and chaos in the West.

A rough estimate, based on U.S. retail prices, suggests that the global heroin market is above the $500 billion mark. This multi-billion-dollar hike is the result of a significant increase in the volume of heroin sold worldwide coupled with a moderate increase in retail prices.

Based on the most recent (UNODC) data (2017), opium production in Afghanistan is of the order of 9000 metric tons. After processing, this is equivalent to approximately 900,000 kilos of pure heroin. 

With the surge in heroin addiction since 2001, the retail price of heroin has increased. According to DEA intelligence, one gram of pure heroin was selling in December 2016 in the domestic U.S. market for $902 per gram. One gram of pure heroin selling at $902 is equivalent to almost $1 million a kilo ($902,000).

Since 2001, the use of heroin in the U.S. has increased more than 20 times. The Lugenpresse rarely reports on how the dramatic increase in the global “supply of heroin” has contributed to the explosion at the retail level.

There were 189,000 heroin users in the U.S. in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. By 2012-13, there were 3.8 million heroin users in the U.S., according to a study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The number of heroin users today, including addicts and casual users, is well in excess of 4 million.

The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions.

The global monetary value of the heroin market protected by powerful crime syndicate groups is colossal.

The heroin business is not “filling the coffers of the Taliban” as claimed by [the] US government and the international community: quite the opposite! The proceeds of this illegal trade are the source of wealth formation, largely reaped by powerful business/criminal interests within the Western countries. …

Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multi-billion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade.

From Michel Chossudovsky, “The Spoils of War, Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade” (2005)

The UNODC confirmed in its 2017 report that “only a small share of the revenues generated by the cultivation and trafficking of Afghan opiates reaches Afghan drug trafficking groups. Many more billions of dollars are made from trafficking opiates into major consumer markets.”

A large share of global money laundering, as estimated by the IMF, is linked to the trade in narcotics.

Drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”

In the following video, HSBC bank whistleblower Hervé Falciani explains how the “money comes from drug traffickers.”