US War In Afghanistan Is Fueling Global Heroin Epidemic & Enabling The Drug Trade

When the U.S. overthrew the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, it set the stage for the explosive growth of Afghanistan’s opium industry. In this episode of ‘Behind the Headline,’ host Mnar Muhawesh explains how the global war on terror created a global epidemic of heroin overdoses.

 In the summer of 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announced a total ban on the cultivation of opium poppy, the plant from which heroin is made. Those caught planting poppies in Taliban-controlled parts of the country were beaten and marched through villages with motor oil on their faces.

The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium poppy.

MINNEAPOLIS — The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” are more intertwined than that media and our elected officials would like us to think. 

And this became full front and center when the U.S.-led global crusades overlapped in Afghanistan, leaving in their wake a legacy of death, addiction and government corruption tainting Afghan and American soil. 

In the U.S., the War in Afghanistan is among the major contributing factors to the country’s devastating heroin epidemic.

 Despite our promises to eradicate the black market, the U.S. actually enables the illegal drug trade. As journalist Abby Martin writes, the U.S. government has had a long history of facilitating the global drug trade: In the 1950s, it allowed opium to be moved, processed and trafficked throughout the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia while it trained Taiwanese troops to fight Communist China. In the 80s, the CIA provided logistical and financial support to anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua who were also known international drug traffickers. 

And in 2012, a Mexican government official claimed that rather than fighting drug traffickers, the CIA and other international security forces are actually trying to “manage the drug trade.”

DYI Comments:  The CIA has been involved in the drug trade since at least Vietnam and possibly earlier.  Has been used to fund covert operations instead of requesting Dollars from Congress and all of their questions.  No doubt certain actors within the agency have become wealthy dealing in drugs as well.

From day one the attack on Afghanistan was not about terrorism but as an avenue to overwhelm the Taliban with U.S. forces and regain control over the heroin trade!

DYI