The source is adamant, "CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection."
And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump's going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge; "In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade. It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap. The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless."
None of this deviates from the CIA's modus operandi.
Past examples abound. The most notorious concerns the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos -- complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the setup of nefarious Air America to export the opium.
The whole story was exposed on Prof. Alfred McCoy's seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia -- which drove Langley nuts.
A contemporary counterpart would be a recent book by Italian journalist Enrico Piovesana detailing the New Opium War in Afghanistan.
The return of Air America
A Pakistani intel source with vast Pashtun/ tribal area contacts delves into even more incendiary territory; "According to our best information the CIA has brought in their al-Qaeda-Daesh proxies into Afghanistan to justify the additional American troops." That would neatly tie in with Trump being cornered by his generals.
And then, there's Moscow. Last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry was adamantly denouncing "foreign fighters" transferred by "unknown helicopters" as the perpetrators of a massacre of Hazara Shi'ites in a northern Afghanistan province; "It seems that the command of the NATO forces controlling the Afghan sky stubbornly refuses to notice these incidents."
It does not get more serious than that; Moscow denouncing sectors of the US-trained Afghan Armed Forces side by side with NATO engaged in covert ops supporting jihadis. Russian intel has hinted -- discreetly -- for quite some time that US intel is covertly sponsoring Daesh -- a.k.a. "ISIS Khorasan" -- in Afghanistan.
Russian intel is very much aware of the Afghan chapter in the New Great Game. Russian citizens are "collateral damage" of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, "Italy, France and the Netherlands," and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.
Well, Air America, after all, never died. It just relocated from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the arid crossroads of Central and South Asia.
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