Vineland-related: Bush & international drugs traffic

[pynchonoid]

 >So far, Bush II has
>managed to do serious damage to the terrorists and
>the
>drug industry in Afghanistan.



Facts suggest a different story.  As in the past,
the current US administration pursues policies that
permit its military allies to profit from the
international traffic in illegal drugs.


http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2002/11/15112002182742.asp

"Tajik Deputy Foreign Minister Salohiddin Nasriddinov
explained how the year-long antiterror campaign in
Afghanistan has affected narcotics smuggling in the
region: 'Over the same time [as the campaign against
terrorism] we see that the amount of narcotics being
transported from Afghanistan through the neighboring
countries and on to Europe and the United States is
growing. This is because over the year the
international community has been fighting terrorism,
they have forgotten that up until now the drug
business has been one of the main occupations of the
people of Afghanistan.' [...] The United Nations
Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention estimates
that Afghanistan produces 75 percent of the world's
opium. And despite poppy-eradication programs
conducted jointly earlier this year by the Afghan
government and foreign agencies, the UN says Afghan
poppy fields this year are expected to yield between
1,900 and 2,700 tons of opium. That level of
cultivation is equal to the production levels reached
in Afghanistan during the mid-1990s. "



http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021118-070142-9301r

"By the end of this year, Afghan farmers will have
grown 30,750 hectares of opium poppy, up dramatically
from 1,685 hectares in 2000 when the Taliban had
succeeded in almost eradicating the crop. [...] last
month, the Bush administration issued a report saying
the huge increase in drug production since the Taliban
were driven out of Afghanistan was 'disappointing but
not unexpected.' "

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021025-064738-3134r

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- Poppy cultivation
increased nearly 19-fold between 2001 and 2002 in
Afghanistan, the world's leading exporter of heroin,
according to a new U.S. study of poppy cultivation in
the post-Taliban state. 

According to the new survey, local farmers cultivated
approximately 30,759 hectares in 2002, during the peak
season for poppy in Afghanistan, the first since the
December 2001 Bonn Agreement which established the
first interim authority after the Taliban were ousted.


During the same period in 2001, only 1,685 hectares of
poppy were cultivated in the last year of the
Taliban's rein in the Central Asian state. The 2001
decline was due largely to a ban on poppy cultivation
imposed by Taliban leader Mullah Omar in July 2001.
[...] some warlords still influential in Afghanistan
have profited in the past from their country's illicit
drug trade. "


http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/304/nation/Drug_trade_flourishes_again_in_Afghanistan+.shtml

"[...] The location of the laboratory in Imam Sahib is
secret because, like the estimated 61 other heroin
factories in northern Afghanistan that produce the
deadly narcotic, it operates with the compliance, and
possibly the protection, of the warlords the US-led
bombing campaign helped bring to power.
[...]Antinarcotics officials criticize the US-led
campaign in Afghanistan for targeting terrorism but
not the trade that helps to create both the
instability and the income upon which terror groups
thrive. That is a contradiction, drug control analysts
in the region say, that will continue to undermine
Afghanistan and the governments of Central Asia. [...]
Karzai's own government includes rumored drug barons.
Haji Abdul Qadir, a vice president who was gunned down
in Kabul in July, was reputed to be eastern
Afghanistan's main drug lord. Leaders of the Northern
Alliance, the US-backed coalition that helped defeat
the Taliban, now control the defense and interior
ministries - and, drug analysts say, the illegal
narcotics trade in the north. [...] "


"Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say,
that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon
the world, there also are to be found those substances
which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath
decided to control. Get me?  Now old Bush used to be
head of CIA, so you figure it out."
-Vineland, p. 354





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