Afghan Heroin Output 4x Greater Despite U.S. Spending $1.5 Million/Day ($9.3 Billion Total) to 'Fight' It

The legacy of madmen like former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice-President Dick Cheney and others in the George W. Bush administration were part of a neo-con bandwagon to remake the world in the image they desired. They are responsible for starting wars with Afghanistan and Iraq in their dream of a New American Century, where the U.S. Empire would sustain and grow it's geopolitical dominance.

Part of that legacy seems to be increasing the drug production in Afghanistan, while spending billions in tax payer money to act as if they are actually "fighting" it. Rumsfeld even used the "danger" of Afghan's drug trade as a justification for being in Afghanistan:

"The danger a large drug trade poses in Afghanistan is too serious to ignore. The inevitable result is to corrupt the government and way of life, and that would be most unfortunate.... It is increasingly clear to the international community that to address the drug problem here is important for the people of Afghanistan."

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Rumsfeld's predictions about corruption were accurate. Little did we know he was foreshadowing what was to come. That was the plan with the U.S. invasion and other "liberating" efforts in Afghanistan that made it into the fourth most dangerous and fourth most corrupt country in the world. It appears the drugs were "liberated" by the war and previous controls of the Taliban, proliferated into aiding the destruction of Afghanistan, rendering it ungovernable.

The only reason Afghans are growing opium is because of the demand in the West that pays for it. Supply is driven by demand in the market. The U.S. apparently only get 4% of the Afghan supply, with most coming from South Africa. But Afghanistan is the largest source of street heroin in Europe and Canada.

In the last quarterly report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko reported that:

"From 2002 through September 2018, the United States has committed an average of more than $1.5 million a day to help the Afghan government combat narcotics. Despite this, 2017 poppy cultivation is more than four times that reported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2002, the first full year of US intervention in Afghanistan."

Sopko says the "drug war" (or drug fostering it would seem) in Afghanistan that has fueled the drug trade and "cost US taxpayers more than $8 billion since 2002, yet Afghanistan’s opium crisis is worse than ever." That's $8.7 billion from 2002-2017, and if the $1.5 million average per days hold for this year, that will be over $9.3 billion of the past 17 years.

The reason for the proliferation seems to be because there is no plant for counternarcotics, as it's no longer part of the "U.S. agenda". Compared to the U.S., the Taliban kept things more in check. Counternarcotics is no longer a priority for the Integrated Country Strategy of the State Department. It has put counternarcotics into general operations, yet "the US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan."

Fighting narcotics drug production in Afghanistan is dead, despite a campaign in November 2017 to "target Taliban revenue streams" through "a series of attacks on narcotics laboratories in southern Afghanistan." It was a major expensive operation that involved various types of aircraft to bomb, surveil and refuel in air. The first attack took down 10 heroin stockpile and money storage facilities, with at least 400 more to go. US General John Nicholson told the media at the time that "the strikes" were ""going to stay up and we are not going to let up".

But that didn't last. It seems there was a "risk that air strikes could result in civilian deaths, alienate rural populations, and strengthen the insurgency." From January to June 2018 the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan "documented 353 civilian casualties, including 149 deaths, from airstrikes, a 52 percent increase from the same period in 2017." One incident reported in the New York Times was of a fourteen member family with 3 children being killed in an airstrike.

The U.S. has repeatedly denied civilian deaths in airstrikes, but their lies are exposed when shrapnel ridden bodies of children appear in media reports. The war on drugs in Afghanistan is as much of a failure as it is in the U.S. While in Afghanistan the U.S. has stopped the war on drugs, it still goes on in the U.S. Both efforts have wasted billions of the people's confiscated money (taxes). And the drug trade is still booming.

Innocent people get caught up in tyrannical attempts to control every substance that is scheduled as "illegal", no matter how safe it is, especially cannabis compared to alcohol. People are wasting away in prison for simply buying a few grams. Although not a proper solution, they could legalize it all and try to tax it to generate revenue that way, and waste less from working taxpayers. It's still bullshit taxation, but asking for decriminalization of drugs is like asking for something that just won't happen. At least this way their taking money only from the drug industry, and not taking money from everyone else to try to stop it.

Afghanistan would be more peaceful I think, and have less dead civilians, if the U.S. butted out, but that probably won't happen for a long long time. The same is true within the U.S. stopped the insane war on drugs, which is really just a war on people in the end.

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References:

• AS THE US SPENT $1.5 MILLION A DAY TO “FIGHT” AFGHAN HEROIN PRODUCTION, HEROIN OUTPUT QUADRUPLED
  The Drug Catastrophe in Afghanistan
• CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX 2017
• SIGAR QUARTERLY REPORT TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS
• The U.S. begins bombing Taliban drug labs as Trump’s Afghanistan strategy takes hold
• A Family of 14 Dies in an Airstrike. U.S. Officials Deny They Were Civilians.

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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