Chris Hedges: Opium, Rape and the American Way

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Opium, Rape and the American Way

Posted on Nov 2, 2009
By Chris Hedges


The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.

“We need to tear the mask off of the fundamentalist warlords who after the tragedy of 9/11 replaced the Taliban,” Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament two years ago for denouncing government corruption and the Western occupation, told me during her visit to New York last week. “They used the mask of democracy to take power. They continue this deception. These warlords are mentally the same as the Taliban. The only change is physical. These warlords during the civil war in Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 killed 65,000 innocent people. They have committed human rights violations, like the Taliban, against women and many others.”

“In eight years less than 2,000 Talib have been killed and more than 8,000 innocent civilians has been killed,” she went on. “We believe that this is not war on terror. This is war on innocent civilians. Look at the massacres carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Look what they did in May in the Farah province, where more than 150 civilians were killed, most of them women and children. They used white phosphorus and cluster bombs. There were 200 civilians on 9th of September killed in the Kunduz province, again most of them women and children. You can see the Web site of professor Marc Herold, this democratic man, to know better the war crimes in Afghanistan imposed on our people. The United States and NATO eight years ago occupied my country under the banner of woman’s rights and democracy. But they have only pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They put into power men who are photocopies of the Taliban.”

Afghanistan’s boom in the trade in opium, used to produce heroin, over the past eight years of occupation has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban, al-Qaida, local warlords, criminal gangs, kidnappers, private armies, drug traffickers and many of the senior figures in the government of Hamid Karzai. The New York Times reported that the brother of President Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been collecting money from the CIA although he is a major player in the illegal opium business. Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium in a trade that is worth some $65 billion, the United Nations estimates. This opium feeds some 15 million addicts worldwide and kills around 100,000 people annually. These fatalities should be added to the rolls of war dead. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091102_opium_rape_and_the_american_way/

[thunder rising]

1. WRONG: involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. Taliban outlawed opium production

During the year of Taliban rule the opium production dropped to near zero.

[roakes10190]

2. Taliban and opium

Yes, when the Taliban were in power they did outlaw opium but now they're back supporting it to fund their operations.

[thunder rising]

3. Afghanistan is now vertically integrated. It exports heroin. Opium? That's so pre-invasion.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. So we are told, by the government that is supporting the drug trafficking warlords.

Who to believe?

[TheMadMonk]

5. One thing people forget or don't know is that the Talliban is much more than...

...a political party. It is a people, a very large number of whom, are Pakistani not Afghan. So when the United States declared war on the Talliban, it pretty much made an open declaration to commit genocide.

Yeah, desparate times call for desparate measures. If I was facing not only personal, but racial extinction, I might be tempted to explore all avenues of making a buck with which to defend myself and my people, and if I could funnel my product through rogue elements within the agressing nation, into a corrupted system where that product serves admirably to weaken that agressing nation internally, I'd bloody well jump at the promise of poetic justice.

Point to ponder. We hear about intercepted shipments measuring in the tons and more, and yet narry an upward blip in the street price. This suggests not only a huge "pipeline", but equally huge stockpiles of "product" in destination markets.


Oh, and just because I'm stoned and the idea occured to me: "Terrorists" might well conceal or even deliberately shield themselves within the civilian population, very few people will dispute this. However, it is the (high tech) agressor/enforcer who determines the "exchange rate".

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. My understanding is that it is primarily a Pashtun nationalist party,

and as the British drawn border split the Pashtun nation (as they always liked to do - taking 'divide and conquer' quite literally) we have 2/3 of Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 1/3 in Pakistan.

I think the UN needs to have a 'borders' summit, whereby all those nations that were artificially divided by the European empires can be re-formed into cohesive national entities. It would prevent these endless ethnic-based civil wars that were the purpose of the original divisions - if the empire power had the locals constantly vying for dominance against each other, they would have less capability to fight the empire.

There should be a Kurdish nation, carved out of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. There should be a Pashtun nation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The horrors of the civil war between Tutsi and Hutus was due to the dividing of those tribes between the nations of Rawanda and Burundi by European imperialists.

The Age of Empire is supposedly over, but it will never be done with until the people can form their own nations and draw their own borders.

[yurbud]

7. Do you think the business people who dictate our wars give a rat's ass about whether selling

heroin hurts your kid?

All they care about is whether they profit from the heroin business. The rest is window dressing.