Word: afghanistans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...none of this is to mention that Afghanistan is a country swimming in the heroin trade. Illicit narcotics is conservatively put at $3 billion a year - about 15% of Afghanistan's GDP. Finding someone not one way or another involved in it is next to impossible. (See six ways...
...real question for the U.S. should not be about the morality of a drug dealer on the CIA's payroll but whether it's a metaphor for the huge challenge we face in Afghanistan. Do we stand any chance at all of building a modern, peaceful nation with confederates like Ahmed Wali Karzai? Vietnam would suggest the answer...
...came into Afghanistan in October 2001 with the same willful blindness. The CIA knew that its ally the Tajik Northern Alliance was a paid-up proxy of Iran, just as it was fully aware that another ally, Uzbek General Dostum, was one of Afghanistan's great butchers (though Dostum has always denied the widespread allegations of his brutality). When it came to finding crucial partners on the ground, there were simply no alternatives...
...forget that the CIA isn't the only organization with questionable people on its payroll. Since the beginning of the war, NATO has been bribing drug smugglers to let fuel pass through the Khyber Pass from Pakistan into Afghanistan. NATO payments, thousands of dollars for each truck, have to dwarf anything the CIA is giving to Ahmed Wali Karzai. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' offensive in Afghanistan...
...bank that the CIA knows all of this, just as it knew in the early '60s that Diem's brother was a corrupt thug. You can also be certain that the CIA would prefer to have untainted sources. But the bone-dry bed of reality in Afghanistan is that there are few if any to be had. In that country, you survive by renting clans, tribes and narcotics dealers, which comes with their unsavory business whether you like...