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2020-12-26 Afghanistan
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Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State
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Somehow we managed to miss this very long article from 2013. Key paragraphs: [RollingStone] After 13 years of war, we haven’t defeated the Taliban, but we have managed to create a nation ruled by drug lords
Helmand
...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
Province in southern Afghanistan is named for the wide river that runs through its historic provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, a low-slung city of shrubby roundabouts and glass-fronted market blocks. When I visited in April, there was an expectant atmosphere, like that of a whaling town waiting for the big ships to come in. In the bazaars, the shops were filled with dry goods, farming machinery and cycle of violences. The teahouses, where a man could spend the night on the carpet for the price of his dinner, were packed with migrant laborers, or nishtgar, drawn from across the southern provinces, some coming from as far afield as Iran
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...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
and Pakistain. The schools were empty; in war-torn districts, police and Taliban
...Arabic for students ...
alike had put aside their arms. It was harvest time.
Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history. With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90 percent of the world’s supply. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia’s GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1980s; in Afghanistan today, according to U.N. estimates, the opium industry accounts for 15 percent of the economy, a figure that is set to rise as the West withdraws. "Whatever the term narco state means, if there is a country to which it applies, it is Afghanistan," says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit economies in conflict zones. "It is unprecedented in history."
Even more shocking is the fact that the Afghan narcotics trade has gotten undeniably worse since the U.S.-led invasion: The country produces twice as much opium as it did in 2000. How did all those poppy fields flower under the nose of one of the biggest international military and development missions of our time? The answer lies partly in the deeply cynical bargains struck by former Afghanistan's Caped President Hamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai
...A product, and probably the sole product, of the Southern Alliance ...
in his bid to consolidate power, and partly in the way the U.S. military ignored the corruption of its allies in taking on the Taliban. It’s the story of how, in pursuit of the War on Terror, we lost the War on Drugs in Afghanistan by allying with many of the same people who turned the country into the world’s biggest source of heroin.
Afghanistan is landlocked, and its borders leak opium like sieves into five neighboring countries. In recent years, the northern route to Russia and Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
via Tajikistan has gained importance, but the southern route through Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
still accounts for the largest portion of opium that leaves the country. From there, it is smuggled into Iran, and then onward to the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Africa. Most of it is destined for Western Europe.
The Balochistan border area between Afghanistan, Pakistain and Iran is one of the most remote and lawless places on Earth. Two hundred thousand square miles of desert and dune seas are broken only by spindly granitic eruptions; the ethnic Baloch and Pashtun tribes that control the area are heavily armed and have been involved in various kinds of smuggling for centuries. Some are nominally cooperative with the state, while others are engaged with a bewildering mix of Death Eater groups: secular Baloch rebels who seek independence from Pakistain, Sunni anti-Iranian groups and a wide array of Islamist krazed killers, including the Taliban. It’s a natural haven for illicit activities.
At the center of this world is Baramcha, a smuggling hub on the Afghan side of the border in the Chagai Hills, 150 miles to the south and free of government control since 2001. It functions as a kind of switching station for much of the opium trade. The harvest by farmers like Mirza Khan is consolidated by local traders into larger shipments — ranging from a few hundred pounds to several tons — and sent to Baramcha, where it is purchased by Pak and Iranian smugglers who carry it abroad. The big deals are conducted between trusted parties, with money sent via the informal money-trading system known as hawala, which is also a linchpin in global money-laundering circuits. One side pays the hawaladar, who gives you a phone number and a code that, used at a corresponding hawaladar a country or continent away, lets the recipient claim the money. The accounts are settled later.
Baramcha is jointly controlled by the Taliban and a handful of powerful smuggling families, pre-eminent among them that of Hajji Juma Khan, a drug baron who was arrested by the DEA in Jakarta in 2008. Today, his relative Hajji Sharafuddin presides over the smugglers of the town, while the Taliban enforces security. "The Taliban has a court there to resolve people’s problems," says Sami. "The security situation is good for the people living there."
Baramcha was once just a collection of mud-walled compounds, but these days you can find late-model Land Cruisers driving past concrete mansions — this despite sporadic raids and Arclight airstrike
 ...KABOOM! ...
s by U.S. and Afghan forces. The area is so remote that raiding teams would have to refuel their American helicopters in the desert using fuel bladders parachuted out the back of a cargo plane. "There’s an area of town that we used to call Hajji JMK Village," says a member of Afghanistan’s elite commando units who has hit the area a number of times with Marines and British special forces. "It’s like a Sherpur in the desert," he says, referring to a neighborhood in Kabul notorious for its gaudy "poppy palaces" built by the country’s warlords. "They had everything out there: generators, appliances, fancy cars. We used to take ice cream out of their freezers."
During the raids, he tells me, Baramcha’s inhabitants would flee across the border to Pakistain, where Pak forces would line up and stand guard until the Americans left. "The drug smugglers and the ISI are tight together," he says, referring to Pakistain’s intelligence service. Sami makes similar claims about Baramcha’s leadership. "They have houses on the Pak side," he says. (The ISI denies any connection to smugglers or the Taliban.)
The U.N. has estimated that the Taliban makes hundreds of millions of dollars from taxing opium and other illicit activities. But that’s only a fraction of the $3 billion that Afghanistan earns from the drug trade. To find the biggest beneficiaries of opium, you need to go from the poppy palaces in Baramcha to the ones in Kabul. 
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Posted by trailing wife 2020-12-26 00:00||
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File under: Narcos
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Posted by Frank G 2020-12-26 09:20||
2020-12-26 09:20||
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Posted by Little Big Guy 2020-12-26 09:36||
2020-12-26 09:36||
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