The Peristaltic Testator

. . . that you haven't heard on the evening news. It turns out one cannot understand Afghanistan's recent history without considering the role the "illicit" poppy crop and heroin labs have played in the last 30 years:

Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets. . . .

Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a ten-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.

This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally. . . .

Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.*

(Emphasis mine.)

That was then, what about now? It's worse:

Afghanistan had a record harvest of 8,200 tons of opium in 2007, a 34 per cent increase in production over 2006. The total opium export is valued at US dollars 4 billion in Afghanistan, an increase of 29 per cent over 2006. The opium economy is now equivalent to more than half (53 per cent) of the country's licit gross domestic product (GDP). (Again, emphasis mine.)

So, why don't "we" do anything? Sadly, we -- through our covert intelligence agency the CIA -- started this, and intend to keep it going. After all, President Hamid Karzai's brother is on the payroll:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. . . .

The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

And even if we wanted to "develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw", there's the little matter of cash. Remember, that white powder is right now probably helping our banking system a great deal:

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

We has a country are now hooked on heroin not literally but economically. That is not an infusion one kicks cold turkey, especially since so many of our more traditional assets are tanking in value.

Expect the war in Afghanistan to continue.


*Those doubtful of the allegations raised in that excerpt should look into the author's work. The CIA tried to quash his first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, but it was too well researched to be simply swept under the rug. I tried to get a copy from our city library system, but, alas, it is kept as a research text, meaning it cannot be checked out. That was probably done to prevent the spooks from "losing" the library's copies. You can hear an interview with the author here.

Some time has passed since my last entry simply because new information came available. Some of it was surprising in its newness (to me, at least); some of it surprised me because I had never considered it myself (for personal reasons I hope to outline).

( First, the new information. )

( Next, information I had to reconsider. )

In the last Saga, I noted the suspicious circumstances behind the current H1N1 virus (swine flu), how it seems to be artificial. This led to some very sobering reflection on demographics and, somewhat tangentally, the economy. This entry should reassure everyone that our economy is probably not what it seems, as smoking crater of ruin. In fact, it is probably quite a bit worse, ( having been propped up as a sham for perhaps decades. )

I've just about had it with the countless whining progressives that are bemoaning the Democratic Party's lack of action in this last year. Why? I'm no knee-jerk Republican (well, not any more). I do, though, recognize that every Democratic member of Congress -- not to mention the President -- has very good reason to tread carefully. Whoever is behind many of the questionable machinations and shenanigans this country has suffered in recent years seems to favor policies championed by the right side of the congressional aisle.

I'm not talking about the right-wing noise machine that passes for our mainstream mass media, either (well, not this time). I'm talking about ( far more serious shenanigans. )

In Part III of this saga, I ended with a mention of Michael C. Ruppert and the CIA's connection to drugs. His story began December of 1975 when (as many stories begin) he met a woman:

"(I)t's not too often you meet a woman who is beautiful, intelligent, literate and witty siting in a bar with a bunch of police officers," Ruppert said. "She was definitely somebody I wanted to see more of."

Ruppert got Teddy's phone number at breakfast. They went to dinner the next weekend then spent most of the next 15 months together.

As their relationship grew, Ruppert grew suspicious of this woman, and not in the usual way, the story notes. She had unusual skills, like being able to field strip a gun in seconds, being as good a shot as him (an LAPD cop), being "vastly more versed in the vernacular of law enforcement than any police groupie Ruppert had ever encountered," and, perhaps most important, having no visible means of financial support.

( Needless to say, the relationship did not last. )

Read enough of these peristaltic entries and you should get a sense that I subscribe to the Peak Oil theory. Essentially, this Shell geologist named M. King Hubbert gave a speech to his oil industry peers in 1956 showing his calculations. In that speech, he predicted oil production in the United States -- at that time the most productive region in the world -- would peak in 1971. He was laughed at. He was scoffed.

But he was right. In fact, his prediction was only off by six months, not to shabby for someone working without computers.

So what is peak? It refers to peak production, not peak supply. That is, Hubbert realized that any worthy business seeks, finds and extracts the easiest supply of oil to seek, find and extract before moving on to the less easy supplies to seek, find and extract. At each increase in extraction difficulty, the company needs to invest more technology and more energy to bring the oil to the surface. As technology increases in efficacy, however, the ability to supply petroleum rises with the demand for the petroleum . . . up to a point.

That point Hubbert called the Peak. Once the Peak is reached, the market demand will outstrip the available production, no matter how much technology -- and energy -- is applied.

That's exactly what happened in 1970. No matter how many new wells the US oil companies drilled, no matter how much fancy (and expensive) technology in their toolkit they applied to the existing wells, they could not increase their rate of crude extraction. From that point on, for the US energy economy to grow, it had to import foreign crude.

Hubbert made other predictions. He predicted the world peak production would be reached in 2000. He could not have predicted, however, the OPEC embargo, a political decision that lowered production rates below market demand. This temporary decrease in production delayed Hubbert's world-wide peak arrival.

With knowledge of Hubbert's Peak coming, one would think policy makers would have been on the ball, making preparations for its arrival. ( The trouble might be that they did prepare, but in different ways. )

I'm currently plowing through Michael C. Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, a book compiled from his decades of research over at From The Wilderness. This stuff is fascinating, but I vowed to myself not to take it too seriously until I could verify at least a fraction of his copious references.

One bit of trivia piqued my interest, though. Remember when I accused security holes in Microsoft architecture of ruining lives? Ruppert notes that these back doors may not have been gates installed by Gates.

In this lengthy article (partially reprinted in Rubicon), Ruppert runs down the history of a fabled piece of software called PROMIS, one that proves critical to understanding current events. In gathering information, he notes something he heard from a source named McCoy:

It was also not by coincidence then that, in the same winter of 94-95, McCoy revealed to me that he was using former Green Berets to conduct physical surveillance of the Washington, D.C. offices of Microsoft in connection with the Promis case. (From The Wilderness) has, within the last month, received information indicating that piracy of Microsoft products at the GE Aerospace Herndon facility were likely tied to larger objectives, possibly the total compromise of any Windows based product. It is not by chance that most of the military and all of the intelligence agencies in the U.S. now operate on Macintosh systems. (Emphasis mine.)

That paragraph also appears in hard copies of Rubicon, New Society Publishers, 2006, p. 159, for those too fearful of reprisals to visit his site. I don't blame you.