Obama War To Defend The Opium Traffickers by Michele Steinberg from Executive Inteligence Review

Obama War To Defend
The Opium Traffickers by Michele Steinberg

     April 1—In a special edition of the LaRouche PAC Weekly Report of March 31 (published in this issue), Lyndon LaRouche said that the center of the strategic battle against the British Empire is Afghanistan.

Remember, ... there's a war going on in Afghanistan. In this war, the United States, under the present President, is defending the right of the drug-traffickers to continue to operate without interference. We're fighting a war—we're sending troops in, to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, in order to protect the drug-traffickers! These drug-traffickers are also the major source of support for control of Russia. Because they harm Russia, ... like the recent [bombings] that just happened in Moscow. These are things which were done, and are being done against the United States, by killing our troops, in Afghanistan—with the President's permission, and encouragement!

At the same time, the same forces, the same group of people who were behind 9/11, are operating against Russia, too, now. And will operate against other nations.

     And Obama is practically committing an act of treason, by sending U.S. troops into area, to be killed, by the logistical force which Obama is defending. If that isn't tantamount to treason, I don't know what is.

While the U.S. protection of the British-sponsored opium production in Afghanistan started under the Bush-Cheney Administration, it was Obama who ended all eradication of opium, and ended the efforts to eliminate the drug lords and traffickers who fund the Taliban and other insurgencies.

The background to Obama's treason, from Spring 2008 to the present, is summarized here:

Chronology

Spring 2008: EIR researchers begin exposing the opium-protection policy in Afghanistan, after receiving detailed briefings from veterans of the Afghan War, who describe that the military targetting of the "narco-khans" (drug lords), opium and heroin warehouses, or drug traffickers is absolutely forbidden under NATO rules of engagement. Only "terrorists" and "insurgents" can be militarily targetted, and a decision by the NATO Council in Brussels would be required to change the rules of engagement. The Bush-Cheney Administration had totally backed the British, who occupied the opium-producing areas of Southern Afghanistan, and whose policy is to protect the opium fields and trafficking.

Under the direction of LaRouche, EIR publishes a series of articles and special reports documenting the connection of the opium traffic to the financing of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. EIR identifies the role of Dubai—a British-run money-laundering banking center—and other offshore banking havens, as the centers that must be closed down to cut off the logistical flow to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

     Aug. 1, 2008: EIR reports:

There is now full recognition within U.S. military circles that the commanders of the Taliban, and Taliban's al-Qaeda allies, are funding their armies—as EIR warned more than a decade ago—with opium and heroin trafficking, as well as a newer, burgeoning empire in hashish production. One U.S. intelligence source stated that more than $100 million a year, directly from the opium grown in Afghanistan alone, goes directly to the Taliban, for its military operations.

The source put the overall monetary value of the Afghan opium trade now accounting for 93% of the world's opium production last year at approximately $160 billion....

July 27, 2008: Thomas Schweich, a former top counter-narcotics official in the State Department, steps forward to expose the opium empire in Afghanistan that had grown under the NATO occupation. In a New York Times Magazine feature article, Schweich writes,

Over the next two years [from July 1, 2006], I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department.... The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

     Schweich reports that the Bush Administration's backing for Karzai's insistence that aerial eradication of opium fields be ended, was fatal to the counter-narcotics effort. He shows how forcing the U.S. anti-drug forces to use manual eradication has led to U.S. troops fighting farmers and tribal leaders, when the U.S. forces tried to seize opium fields. Such manual eradication was deliberate sabotage by the British and the Bush Administration. Competent anti-drug experts in the U.S. knew, from the successful experience in Colombia, that other effective non-lethal means were possible.

July 30, 2008: Gen. Barry McCaffrey (USA, ret.), the former head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton, submits his report on Afghanistan to Col. Michael Meese at West Point.

EIR endorses McCaffrey's findings in an Aug. 7 press release, and reports:

McCaffrey writes: 'Afghanistan is in misery.' Sixty-eight percent of the population has never known peace, life expectancy is only 44, and Afghanistan has the highest maternal death rate in the world.... The atmosphere of terror cannot be countered mainly by military means. We cannot win through a war of attrition.... Afghanistan will not be solved by the addition of two or three more U.S. combat brigades from our rapidly unraveling Army.'

Instead, McCaffrey argues that, in addition to building up the Afghan security forces, economic measures are also required. He calls for the deployment of a 'five battalion Army engineer brigade ... to lead a five-year road-building effort employing Afghan contractors and training and mentoring Afghan engineers.... The war will be won when we fix the Afghan agricultural system which employs 82% of the population.... The war will be won when the international community demands the eradication of the opium and cannibis crops and robustly supports the development of alternative economic activity.'

     McCaffrey pointed to the tremendous growth in the poppy crop since the U.S. invasion in 2001 and warned that 'Unless we deal head-on with this enormous cancer, we should have little expectation that our efforts in Afghanistan will not eventually come to ruin.' 

August 2008-January 2009: EIR publishes feature articles continuing to detail the Afghanistan opium/heroin traffic connection to terrorism, including the November 2008 attack by Islamic extremist narco-terrorists on Mumbai, India. The LaRouche movement organizes among elected officials, and military and intelligence professionals, to force a change in Afghanistan strategy to eliminate the opium traffic, and thereby cut off the logistics for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Jan. 16, 2009: EIR's cover story on how to combat the drug trade is published under the title, "Drive the Narcos Out of the Americas." It includes excerpts from a Fall 2008 report by General McCaffrey on Mexico, which called for a joint U.S.-Mexico anti-drug fight, "Colombia Nearly Disappeared by Negotiating with Narcoterrorists," and "How Drugs Can Be Wiped Out, Totally" (which explains how crops can be wiped out using high-tech, non-lethal methods); LaRouche's 1985 fifteen-point plan to combat narcoterrorism; and "George Soros, Britain's Drug Kingpin Waging War Against the Americas."

January 2009: There is a short-lived victory for the anti-opium strategy in Afghanistan, with the news that Gen. Bantz John Craddock, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), the highest military commader in Europe, had approved NATO military operations against drug traffickers, narco-lords, and drug refineries and warehouses in Afghanistan. But, on Jan. 28, the German news weekly Der Spiegel reports on a leaked classified NATO document, in which Craddock approved the targetting of narco-traffickers and the bombing of narcotics laboratories in Afghanistan. After a violent backlash from several NATO countries that support legalization of drugs, the policy is shelved, and shortly thereafter, Craddock's rotation as SACEUR ends.

     Enter Obama

March 2009: Obama's Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, announces in Brussels that the poppy eradication effort in Afghanistan has been ended because it is "wasteful" and is driving Afghan farmers "into the arms" of the Taliban, because it destroys the farmers' livelihood. Holbrooke downplays the significance of drug money in financing the insurgency, and lies that the United States and NATO will focus efforts on interdicting narcotics shipments, and on stopping money laundering. No such actions are carried out against the Afghanistan dope trade, and instead the Taliban insurgents continue to make major gains in Afganistan—financed by dope money.

A George Soros-linked pro-legalization website, www.stopthedrugwar.com, gleefully welcomes Holbrooke's denunciation of opium eradication, and claims the decision as a victory for the march towards drug legalization. Holbrooke had been a business partner of Soros, the world's leading drug legalizer, in a biomedical company.

     May 11, 2009: Obama suddenly fires Afghanistan commander Gen. David McKiernan, and replaces him with Gen. Stanley McChrystal. McKiernan was widely reported to have been favorable to SACEUR General Craddock's decision to target narcotics operations and laboratories.

With the Holbrooke declaration and the McChrystal appointment, any effective U.S./NATO operation against the dope traffic that is financing the Islamic extremist terrorist operations, from Afghanistan to the Northern Caucasas to Moscow and Mumbai, India, is ended.