Thirty Years War Made Afghanistan Into a Narco-State

April 3, 2010 (LPAC)—Fully substantiating Lyndon LaRouche's call for the impeachment of President Barack Obama, for his treasonous support for the Afghan opium traffickers including the Taliban, noted author Alfred McCoy (The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia) penned a lengthy article in the March 30 online edition of Salon, detailing the evolution of Afghanistan into a full-blown narco-state, over the course of the thirty years war, launched by the likes of Bernard Lewis and his Zbigniew Brzezinski, in 1979.

McCoy noted that, contrary to what most people assume, Afghanistan was not an opium producer prior to the launching of the mujahideen war and the Soviet military occupation that soon followed. With the surrogate war against the Soviets from 1979-1990, the entire agricultural economy of Afghanistan, including irrigation and water-management systems that were built up in the 1950s and 1960s, with the assistance of the United States, were destroyed, opening the door for the opium production that fueled the mujahideen insurgency, with the backing of the Pakistan ISI.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the opium production continued to grow, during the 1990s period of civil war. After the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996, opium production skyrocketed, and the Taliban also sponsored the buildup of heroin laboratories. Soon after the Taliban takeover, the UN reported that Afghanistan was producing 4,600 metric tons of opium a year—75% of the world production.

For reasons still being debated, in 2000, the Taliban regime abruptly shut off opium production, slashing it by 94%. But once the U.S. invasion and overthrow of the Taliban took place in the Autumn of 2001, opium production flourished once again. By 2007, the UN reported that Afghanistan had produced 8,200 metric tons of opium, 140% of world consumption. The clearest indication that the Bush Administration, and, now the Obama Administration, had no interest in fighting the opium and heroin trade, was the fact that the responsibility for "narcotics control" was outsourced to the British forces in Afghanistan!

McCoy reported that, at a recent conference on the drug crisis in Kabul, Russia's anti-drug chief Viktor Ivanov, reported that Afghan opium was generating $65 billion a year in revenue, with $500 million going to the Afghan farmers, an equal amount going to Taliban, and the remaining $64 billion in the hands of the international mafia—i.e., the British.

McCoy began the article with a description of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's February 2010 press conference in Marja, a small village in the Helmand province, where the "new" U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was launched. Claiming victory over the Taliban insurgents, McChrystal failed to even acknowledge that he was standing in the middle of opium fields, surrounding the village, that supply 40% of the world's opium. And most of the mud huts that made up the village contained heroin laboratories. As McCoy wrote, with some irony, "Rushing through those opium fields to attack the Taliban on Day One of this offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerillas whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants."

It is exactly this point that Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized in his call for Obama's immediate removal from office, for his sending American soldiers to die, fighting an insurgency fueled by the very opium trade that his Administration has de facto embraced.