West looked the other way as Afghan drug trade exploded

West looked the other way as Afghan drug trade exploded
By TOM LASSETER
McClatchy Newspapers


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Locals call them "poppy palaces," the three- or four-story marble homes with fake Roman columns perched behind razor wire and guard shacks in Afghanistan's capital.

Most are owned by Afghan officials or people connected to them, men who make a few hundred dollars a month as government employees but are driven around in small convoys of armored SUVs that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Kabul's gleaming upmarket real estate seems a world away from war-torn southern Afghanistan, but many of the houses were built with profits harvested from opium poppy fields in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

"When you see these buildings, that's not normal money ... that's drug money," said Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar's provincial capital since 2007. "The ministers and the governors are behind the drug dealers, and sometimes they are the drug dealers."

Last year, Helmand and Kandahar provinces accounted for about 75 percent of Afghanistan's poppy cultivation, and Helmand alone was the world's biggest supplier of opium.

Afghan and Western officials say that's because U.S. and NATO-led forces failed to take the drug problem seriously for more than six years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 ousted the Taliban regime.

"They (the Western military) didn't want anything to do with either interdiction or eradication," said Thomas Schweich, a former Bush administration ambassador for counternarcotics and justice reform for Afghanistan. "We warned them over and over again: Look at Colombia."

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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/AP/v-fullstory/story/1041040.html

we actually invaded to release the 4 Cali Cartel bankers Noreaga imprisoned, not to mention the detained ship full of east German weapons, ,for the Contra Terrorists. to be traded for Cali Cartel Cocaine..

same old F'n bullshit never ends

If not then you are a hypocrite of the highest order.

I see where this is leading.... next thing you know someone is gonna say that some US military personnel are raking in a few extra bucks for protecting the flow of opium.

And that just wouldn't be right, would it?

years worth of heroin out there.. get'n cheaper every day

And hasn't happened for years! No, it's never happened!

we have built a super highway from Mexico to Canada????????

Then you have Sibel Edmonds being kept from telling us about the ties to Turkey????????

Where the biggest factories to convert the poppies to heroin are.

and the money goes round and round...........

Drug profits are probably lining the pockets of a few Government officials better than oil money.

I live in Texas and I'm not aware of one.

And who are 'Barry and the boys'?

Is this the current talking point out there? Thanks for any info.

Men in the West made gazillions in profits from said drugs just as they did during the Vietnam War and Iran-Contra.

The other day there was a great post that put some perspective on the junk Petreus was spewing and how Al Queda is no longer a threat in Afghanistan...also how they've fallen out of favor with the Taliban and Pashtun. In short, Al Queda was more trouble than what it was worth. What we're confronting now is the resumption of the civil war between the various tribes and ethnic groups that make up the country. Our troops are now in the middle of a battle for tribal turf. This country has never embraced the nation-state concept as its many ethnic groups and tribes within have learned to be self contained and there is nothing that a national government can really provide. The "drug lords" are also tribal chiefs and politicians. It's the drug trade and the billions it brings in that fuel the wars and encourage the division.

Petreus' attempt to create a "Sons of Iraq" strategy for Afghanistan is deepely flawed as even within the Pashtun or Tajiks or any other group, there are sub groups that use the power voids and their turf to make money and gain power. In essence, we are sitting in the middle of a local conflict that has churned for centuries...ones that confronted "conquerors" from Alexander the Great to modern times and one that this country and the west, in general, still fails to comprehend.