Over the last forty years of Afghanistan’s tragic military history (the war in the 1980s, the civil war in the 1990s and the US occupation since 2001), opium has always played a role in the fate of the country. The sad irony is that Afghanistan’s unique ecology coupled with US military policy in the region…
“I decided I could live with that.” – Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, on the extreme level of civilian casualties in the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan. The first indelible image of the war in Afghanistan for many Americans was probably that of CBS anchorman Dan Rather, wrapped in the voluminous drapery of a…
By resolution 42/112 of 7 December 1987, the UN General Assembly decided to observe 26 June as the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking as an expression of its determination to strengthen action and cooperation to achieve the goal of an international society free of drug abuse. Raise awareness? Rarely acknowledged, (“legal”) drug trafficking was…
President Trump, who is up for re-election this year, has added another “peace” deal to his credentials, a deal that the president, his re-election campaign and his supporters have promoted as proof that Trump is willing and able to resist the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its ceaseless push to keep the U.S. embroiled in…
The Afghanistan papers revealed that for three administrations in a row (Bush, Obama, and Trump), the American public has been lied to and deceived by generals, intelligence officers, and security officials overseeing the war effort. *** Bombings and Downed AircraftIn 2019, according to figures released by Air Force Central Command (AFCENT), the United States “dropped…
Afghanistan’s opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which has a direct impact on the surge of heroin addiction in the US. Despite president Trump’s announced US troop withdrawal, the Afghan opium trade continues to flourish. It is protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of a nexus of powerful financial and criminal interests. In 2004,…
