Vineland & GR context

[pynchonoid]

[...] Despite such statistics, the American military
has, for the most part, looked the other way,
essentially because of the belief that the warlords
can deliver the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One senior
N.G.O. official told me, “Everybody knows that the
U.S. military has the drug lords on the payroll. We’ve
put them back in power. It’s gone so terribly wrong.”
(The Pentagon’s Joseph Collins told me,
“Counter-narcotics in Afghanistan has been a failure.”
Collins said that this year’s crop was estimated to be
the second largest on record. He added, however, that
the Afghan government is planning to “redouble” its
efforts on narcotics control, and that the Pentagon is
“now putting more money into it for the first
time”—seventy-three million dollars.)

The easy availability of heroin also represents a
threat to the well-being of American troops. Since the
fall of 2002, a number of active-duty and retired
military and C.I.A. officials have told me about
increasing reports of heroin use by American military
personnel in Afghanistan, many of whom have been there
for months, with few distractions. A former high-level
intelligence officer told me that the problem wasn’t
the Special Forces or Army combat units who were
active in the field but “the logistical guys”—the
truck drivers and the food and maintenance workers who
are stationed at the military’s large base at Bagram,
near Kabul. However, I was also told that there were
concerns about heroin use within the Marines. The
G.I.s assigned to Bagram are nominally confined to the
base, for security reasons, but the drugs, the former
intelligence officer said, were relayed to the users
by local Afghans hired to handle menial duties. The
Pentagon’s senior leadership has a “head-in-the-sand
attitude,” he said. “There’s no desire to expose it
and get enforcement involved. This is hard shit,” he
added, speaking of heroin. The Pentagon, asked for
comment, denied that there was concern about drug use
at Bagram, but went on to acknowledge that
“disciplinary proceedings were initiated against some
U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan for suspected
drug use.” Asked separately about the allegations
against marines, the Pentagon said that some marines
had been removed from Afghanistan to face disciplinary
proceedings, but blamed alcohol and marijuana rather
than heroin.

The drug lords traditionally processed only hashish
inside the Afghan borders, and shipped poppies to
heroin-production plants in northern Pakistan and
elsewhere. A senior U.N. narcotics official told me
that in the past two years “most of the heroin has
been processed in Afghanistan, as part of a plan to
keep profits in-country.” Only a fraction of what is
produced in Afghanistan is used there, the officer
said. Nonetheless, a U.S. government-relief official
told me, the “biggest worry” is that the growth in
local production will increase the risk of addiction
among G.I.s. A former C.I.A. officer who served in
Afghanistan also said that the agency’s narcotics
officials have been independently investigating
military drug use. [...]

...read it all:
THE OTHER WAR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why Bush’s Afghanistan problem won’t go away.
Issue of 2004-04-12
Posted 2004-04-05
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040412fa_fact>

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