Translated material
The “grass” is turning green, flying to Britain...
US Air Force in the service of Afghan drug lords
The growth of drug production in Afghanistan is as much an ongoing concern of the world community as global warming. Everyone talks about it, but no one knows any radical means of combating these universal human scourges. At the end of October, an international conference on combating the drug threat was held in Kabul. The latest UN report was presented there, according to which Afghan opium supplied to the international market accounts for 93% of the world production of narcotic drugs. Half of this amount is produced in the Helmand province bordering Pakistan, where the main contingent of British troops is stationed.Among the arguments that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made in the House of Commons last year, proving the need to send troops to Helmand, the main one was the increased danger of Afghan heroin, which has become the main potion for drug addicts who have settled on the streets of British cities. The tragedy is that it is British military personnel, as well as their American colleagues, who are now drawn into the ranks of the international mafia, which is busy buying up and exporting drugs produced there outside Afghanistan.
The information that the Vremya Novostei newspaper has on this score was obtained from various Afghan sources, which for obvious reasons cannot be specified. Nevertheless, there is numerous indirect evidence of the involvement of Western military personnel in the drug business. At the beginning of May this year, an operation was planned to destroy poppy plantations with defoliants using aviation in several southern and southeastern provinces of Afghanistan. However, according to sources in the administration of the provinces of Kandahar and Jalalabad, the leaders of the American and British contingents in these provinces, having agreed with the provincial Afghan commanders, banned the destruction of drug plantations.
VN sources explained that the interests of Western military personnel involved in transporting drugs outside of Afghanistan using mainly American military aircraft coincide with the interests of local armed groups that control the cultivation of opium plantations. Afghan officials working on the problem estimate that about 85% of the drugs produced in the south and southeast of the country are transported abroad by American troops - mainly by air...
The Afghans themselves point to several ways to transport the potion. Some sources claim that at the beginning of the chain there are civilian salesmen - usually Americans, operating under the cover of numerous non-governmental organizations and private security firms. They buy “products” from Afghan wholesalers and deliver them to military bases, mainly to the airfield in Kandahar. However, an informed source in the Afghan security forces claims that the US military under no circumstances comes into contact with Western civilian structures and only works directly with local Afghan commanders. And they are already closely “cooperating” with the field commanders responsible for the production of the “product,” mainly from the Taliban movement. The Taliban exercise control over the bank accounts into which money is received through complex schemes for “cleansing” from suspicions of drug origin through Afghans living in the United States and Western Europe.
Payment for drugs is not only money, but also weapons. Afghans claim that direct deals between NATO members and field commanders to exchange weapons and ammunition for drugs are even more popular among the Taliban than the traditional “money for goods” scheme. How can one not recall the “exchange operations” used by our “Shuravi” and their Mujahideen opponents in the 80s of the last century during the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan. It is curious that the current Afghan Mujahideen receive weapons not from NATO warehouses, but from the north of the country, where they are smuggled from Asian countries. A source in the Afghan intelligence services names the settlement of Shurtepa on the Afghan-Turkmen border as one of such transfer points. According to information received from Afghans close to the command of the 205th Army Corps (Kandahar Province) and the brigade stationed in Lashkar Gah (Helmand Province), the delivery of weapons and ammunition to areas controlled by the Taliban is carried out in American or British armored vehicles.
At the beginning of November, several explosions occurred in Kabul, as well as in the provinces of Uruzgan and Bamiyan, in which power is actually owned by the Taliban, and there were many casualties. Informed Afghan sources of VN believe that these explosions were directed primarily against the Shiite Hazaras, who have their own armed forces and are engaged in the cultivation of opium poppy and the production of heroin. They paid the price for starting the drug trade on their own with the American and British military. The explosions were carried out by Taliban competitors in order to intimidate the Hazaras who had invaded someone else's "plot". At the same time, the terrorist attacks were supposed to have an educational impact on the Americans and the British, so that they would not shy away from their “main partners.”
In Kandahar, the Anglo-Saxons work closely with local drug lords from the government structures. Among them, the Afghans themselves name the brothers of the country's president, member of parliament Qayum Karzai and chairman of the provincial council Ahmed Wali Karzai, as well as governor Asabullah Khaled and senator from the so-called “repentant Taliban” Shir Mohammad.
It is worth remembering the explosion that occurred in the house of Wali Karzai in the summer of 2003. Then there were many reports about this in the media, in particular, the Deutsche Welle radio station spoke about it in detail. Less talked about was that the explosion occurred at an ammunition depot at the villa of the president's brother. Informed sources said at the time that the cause of the explosion was a disagreement over a deal between Wali Karzai's men and the US military to sell two Stinger surface-to-air missile systems and deliver them to Karzai's home depot. One of the payment options was payment for drugs...
In connection with this incident, we can recall the disagreements that arose several years ago between President Karzai and the former head of the Afghan Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ahmad Jalili. The latter was forced to resign and leave for the USA. According to one version, the subject of the dispute was the desire of the chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to compile a list of the main Afghan drug lords for the UN and Interpol. If this version is correct, then the reasons for the dissatisfaction with this initiative of the Afghan president can be easily guessed...
As American expert Barnert Rubin noted a month ago at the Kabul conference on drugs, the level of drug mafia presence in the Afghan government is so high that if a decision is made to arrest the drug traffickers, they are able to paralyze the work of the government.
As for the “northern channel” of drug trafficking going through the land border of Afghanistan with the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, it is less connected with military personnel of the United States and Great Britain - the fact is that the Afghan North is controlled mainly by NATO contingents from the Scandinavian countries and Italy and other states. According to a high-ranking source in the security forces of Tajikistan, the role of the Russian military remains significant, remaining in this country after the Russian border guards transferred the functions of protecting the Tajik-Afghan border to the Tajik border service. A VN source in Dushanbe claims that Russian commanders have retained control over a significant part of the cross-border corridor through which “weed” enters the Russian and European markets.
According to some Afghan businessmen, the United States and the official authorities in Kabul are interested in the influx of narco-dollars and narco-euros into the local foreign exchange market. This makes it possible for the Central Bank of Afghanistan to maintain the stability of the national currency, the Afghani. Otherwise, Washington would have to make additional financial injections for this.