News Alert: Brother of Afghan President Is on C.I.A. Payroll, Officials Say

[Robin Landseadel]

Why and how the recent NYT article is perfectly on point as regards  
Inherent Vice:

 From Dave Lindorff at HuffPo:

	. . . What the article didn't mention at all is that there is a clear
	historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its
	Air America airline front-company, were neck deep in the
	Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast
	Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the leading producer and
	exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where there was a resulting
	heroin epidemic.

	A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration,
	as the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly
	documented first in a series titled "Dark Alliance" in the San
	Jose Mercury newspaper, and later in a book by that same
	name, the CIA was deeply involved in the development of and
	smuggling of cocaine into the US, which was soon engulfed in
	a crack cocaine epidemic -- one that continues to destroy
	African American and other poor communities across the
	country. (The Times' role here was sordid -- it and other leading
	papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times
	-- did despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his
	work and his career, and ultimately driving him to suicide,
	though his facts have held up. For the whole sordid tale, read
	Alex Cockburn's and Jeff St. Clair's White Out.) In this case,
	Webb showed that the Agency was actually using the drugs as
	a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to ferry
	down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the
	Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had
	barred the US from supporting the Contras.

	And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the
	world with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their
	overthrow by US forces in 2001, had, according to the UN,
	virtually eliminated opium production there), but now
	responsible for as much as 80 percent of the world's opium
	production -- this at a time that the US effectively finances and
	runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with
	Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the
	Taliban 12-1 according to a recent AP story.

	The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade
	soon follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing
	that trade appears to be played by the Central Intelligence
	Agency. . .

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-lindorff/americas-drug-crisis-brou_b_336843.html