War on Terror - Opium War

The war in Afghanistan makes no sense at all. Why would anybody want to invade and take over this remote and hard land of poor and ferocious men? There are no spoils to be taken, no oil, no important routes. But what is the possible benefit?

The only semi-rational argument is that of Drugs. Afghanistan produces a lot of the stuff (90 percent of the world's supply) ; in the days of Taliban rule, opium was practically eliminated, but since the US intervention, the production shot up many times. Afghani opium is flown from Bagram Air Base to Kosovo, the biggest US base in Europe and then smuggled to Europe . Thus creation of independent Kosovo with its criminal Albanian gangs begins to make sense – as a part of America’s war against Europe . Alternative route is allegedly carried by Chechens via Grozny where an almost independent warlord Kadyrov has his own customs clearance for entry into the Russian market. President Obama is just a supreme heroin pusher, but the same can be said about Queen Victoria , for in 19^th century plucky Brits twice fought wars for harvest, production and delivery of opium. Perhaps this war is the latest in the series of the Opium Wars? It should come as no surprise that the biggest opium-growing regions are Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the Taliban strongholds where so much of the war is being fought. The opium crop employs from 1.6 million to 2.4 million Afghan citizens - as much as 8 percent of the country's 28.4 million people. After President George W. Bush spent 3 years trying to "eradicate" the crop, the opium acreage increased by 61 percent and the value of the crop increased by about one-third, the Washington Post reported in 2006. Opium pays Afghan farmers 12 times as much as food crops. They can't grow food in opium country as easily as they can grow opium. Growing opium may be the best thing that land can be used for. History seems to indicate that. Those two poor, devastated provinces could supply the entire world with nearly all of a drug that the world needs - legally. The entire world needs about 5,000 tons of opium a year for painkillers, according to those semi-reliable sources. Afghanistan is expected to produce 6,900 tons this year, and the wholesale price for opium today, according to Reuters, is $64 a kilo, or $64,000 a metric ton. At that price, United States could buy Afghanistan 's entire opium harvest this year for $442 million. It costs US $1 million to keep a single U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for a year. With 53,000 U.S. troops in country now, that's $53 billion a year. That's why they need to close the deal fast, that's why they're negotiaing with the enemy.

Ethnic Albanian criminal gangs continue to pose a serious security threat, dominating the transit and supply of heroin to Switzerland, warns a federal police expert. (source: ISN Security Watch)

According to the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Switzerland has historically been singled out as one of the countries most affected by ethnic Albanian heroin trafficking, due to the large expatriate population. There were an estimated 94,000 Albanian-speakers in Switzerland in 2000. In the late 1990s, Albanians were blamed for trafficking some 70 to 90 percent of Switzerland's heroin supply into the country. Ethnic Albanian criminal gangs built up a reputation as effective traffickers as they were violent and clannish with a language nobody else could understand and had an honor code similar to the Sicilian mafia. Southeastern Europe lies along the most conventional route - the so-called Balkan route - between the supplier of some 90 percent of the world's heroin, Afghanistan, and its most lucrative consumer market, western Europe. Kosovo's independence proclamation by the Albanian secessionist administration in Pristina in February 2008, follows a course that was drafted back in March 1999 when NATO started a war against Serbia. Kosovo is viewed as a region that is under the tight grip of organized crime and corruption which spans through he entire social and political sphere. The current leadership under Hashim Thaci is to emerge from the unholy alliance of traffickers in the region and the UCK. Pristina government has always been subject to the power of the Mafiosi who were the largest donors of the KLA rebels and want to keep the region in their own sphere of influence. German intelligence service in 2005, described the former Prime Minister of Kosovo Ramous Haradinaj as related «in drug trafficking, extortion and protection business». Reliable and highly informed sources at the Institute for European Policy, based in Germany, in a 2007 last report, commissioned for the German Armed Forces, indicated that the three leading Kosovo politicians, Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti are «Persons protected by the international community although they are deeply involved in all of these affairs». In a Pan-European level perhaps two-thirds of the heroin sold in the streets it is being distributed by Albanian criminal syndicates which are mostly established in Kosovo. Further another crucial element is the existence of a strong Albanian-American lobby in the U.S. East Coast which is interlinked with the still powerful American-Italian Mafia and quite a few mainstream politicians and bureaucrats. This lobby is also a small part of the wider nexus between Pakistan-Saudi Arabia-Turkey business lobbies n Washington that have managed to pursue high politics mainly in the Pentagon and the State Department through the use of retired American Generals and diplomats, attaining great influence even at the expense of the national interests of the USA. According to the U.S. law, "US Foreign Assistance Act of 1961", aid is prohibited to any country or organization that it is involved in drug trafficking. It is noteworthy to emphasize the involvement of the DEA at this point. Until March 1999 it followed a clear-cut policy of repression against the Kosovo related drug crime, but a month before the NATO bombing it pulled down from its own website references connected to Kosovo...

NATO bombing of Serbia, "the Kosovan War" allowed the place (rebel Serbian province) to become a centre of drug activity for the European market. So called "Kosovans" (muslim albanian population of Kosovo and Metohija) had a reputation for smuggling, but mafias there were eager to be involved in supplying the European market and could offer safe storage and a network of smugglers and wholesale dealers in the UK. They also used the refugee crisis to take advantage of this. If Afghanistan was a War to fight Terrorism - it begs the question - who is benefiting from the billions in drug revenues? In one War (Kosovo) a massive European safe haven for traffickers is created as the CIA court drug mafias linked with 'freedom fighters'. In Columbia - Right wing paramilitaries work hand in hand with drug cartels. In Afghanistan, the CIA again courted people involved in the drug trade masquerading as freedom fighters - the 'Northern Alliance' rise to power has seen the old poppy farming come back with a vengeance. It's almost as if the USA is creating the very conditions the drug trade needs to prosper. Some would point to the ease in which drug ravaged communities can be controlled by the state. The consequence of the USA involvement in its wars has been to create a free market for drugs. Was that the intent or just an accident?

Organized Crime in Kosovo