Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the U.S. should add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn't even be over whether the U.S. should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting terrorists. It should be about how quickly the U.S. can extricate its forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney General's office will impanel a grand jury to probe CIA drug dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering, and ineffective "War on Drugs" in this country, and who mindlessly back "zero-tolerance" policies towards drugs in schools and on the job, should demand a "zero-tolerance" policy toward drugs and dealing with drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years, we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but recently we've been learning that it's not the real story. Taliban forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by the military forces of some of America's NATO allies (there is currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very warlords with which the U.S. has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's own brother.

Karzai -- we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti, and Risen -- was a key player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his brother's election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder whether an agency such as the CIA, which has ready access to printers and to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control in Kabul.

Sure that's idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that America's spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti, and Risen piece, where a "former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan," explaining the agency's backing of Karzai, said, "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn't live in Afghanistan."

"The end justifies the means" is America's foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan's drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for Americans.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/lindorff/285



i'm sooooo proud to be an American