Taliban fighters in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. Reuters

It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting.

The Nation | Nov 11, 2009

By Aram Roston

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got–the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues–was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Full Story

Ahmed Wali Karzai, right, the brother of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, at a campaign event in Kandahar in August. Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

NY Times | Oct 28, 2009

by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen.

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 agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. 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.

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

Related

Karzai’s Brother Is a CIA Asset

At this point, everything about the U.S. policy toward the Afghan drug trade — from tolerance to eradication during the Bush administration to an evolving approach to cultivating alternatives — now ought to be questioned.

Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A.

The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai’s role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug trade were not conclusive.

“There’s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence. “And you can’t ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts.”

At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban’s advances.

Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.

These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.

“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”

American officials say that Afghanistan’s opium trade, the largest in the world, directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish.

The Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who are believed to permeate the highest levels of President Karzai’s administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so.

Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations — existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.

“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said.

In the interview in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his brother, the president, for “expenses,” but said he did not know where the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that assistance.

“I don’t know anyone under the name of the C.I.A.,” Mr. Karzai said. “I have never received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan.”

Mr. Karzai acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at Mullah Omar’s old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them.

A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.

“Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Qati’s death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear, for instance, if any agency operatives were present — but officials say the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in custody.

“Matiullah was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr. Karzai said in the interview.

Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai — or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny.

For years, first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.

Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.

The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.

But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said.

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti and James Risen from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

Afghanistan has a monopoly on illegal opium production that has devastating global consequences, a UN report says.

BBC | Oct 21, 2009

UN findings say an opium market worth $65bn (£39bn) funds global terrorism, caters to 15 million addicts, and kills 100,000 people every year.

The UN says corruption, lawlessness and uncontrolled borders result in only 2% of Afghan opiates being seized locally.

The UN says more Russians die annually from Afghan drugs than Soviet soldiers were killed during its Afghan conflict.

Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year.

Most of the opium that leaves Afghanistan makes its way through Pakistan, Central Asia and Iran, leaving a trail of addiction, criminality and death in its wake, according to the report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

It says more people die globally from Afghan opium than any other drug but just a tiny percentage of what is produced is seized on route.
Afghan police men destroying opium poppies in a field during poppy eradication operations in Tarin Kowt, Urugzan, Afghanistan (Archive)
The UN says current Afghan seizure rates of drugs is extremely poor

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UNODC, said Afghanistan’s opium production could create a “perfect storm” in the region.

“The Afghanistan/Pakistan border region has turned into the world’s largest free-trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit – drugs of course, but also weapons, bomb-making equipment, chemical precursors, drug money, even people and migrants,” he said.

He also had some difficult words for those nations currently involved in Afghanistan: “I urge the friends of Afghanistan to recognise that, to a large extent, these uncomfortable truths may be the result of benign neglect.”

Insignificant seizures

The report highlights a number of key factors as to why Afghanistan’s illegal drugs trade has such an impact around the world.

The Taliban’s direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex

One significant reason is that “lawlessness, corruption and uncontrolled borders” are resulting in very limited seizures by the Afghan authorities. Just 2% of drugs are seized per annum, as compared with Colombia’s 36% annually, the report says.

Seizure rates are thought to decline as the drugs move closer to more lucrative key markets, with the value of the drugs doubling with every border crossed.

For example, Iran intercepts about 20% of the opium entering its territory and Pakistan 17% – but Russia and some European countries are seizing less than 5%.

One gram of heroin worth $3 in Kabul is worth up to $100 on the streets of London, Milan or Moscow, it is estimated.

The UNODC is calling for more international resources to tackle the problem at source – in Afghanistan and surrounding areas – where law enforcement costs are cheaper.

Another significant factor includes the vastly increased revenues made by the Taliban and other insurgent groups in taxing opium production in Afghanistan.

An estimated $160m of drug money per year is now available to support terrorists activities, the report suggests.

“The Taliban’s direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex and increasingly widespread,” said Antonia Maria Costa.

“Some profiteers in the heroin trade wear suits and white collars, others wear black turbans.”

In addition, the UN says one of its most surprising finds is that addiction is costing more lives in consumers than the numbers of foreign soldiers killed fighting in Afghanistan.

For example, in Nato member states more than 10,000 people die from Afghan heroin each year – a figure five times higher than the total number of Nato troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001.

In Russia, the country worst-affected by the drug, the annual 30,000 death toll is higher than the total Soviet death toll during the USSR’s Afghanistan campaign of 1979-1989, the UN says.

In addition, the UNODC says there is a pressing need to locate and destroy massive stockpiles of Afghan opium – an estimated 12,000 tons is being hoarded, it believes.

With current supplies far outweighing demand, fears are high that Afghanistan’s opium has the potential to spread terrorism and the drugs trade for many more years to come.

Italian police escort suspect mafia Giuseppe Scaduto (centre) from their headquarters in Palermo. Photograph: Marcello Paternostro/AFP/Getty Images

guardian.co.uk | Oct 1, 2009

by Tom Kington in Rome

The mafia’s formidable grip on Italy has been starkly illustrated by a new report claiming 13 million Italians live in areas where the mob exerts influence over everyday life.

Commissioned by Italy’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission, the report by research institute Censis used crime statistics to find the number of urban and rural districts where clans are active in the Italian south.

The Italians living in the 610 districts identified, even if law abiding and not members of clans, “are in some way conditioned by a presence that draws its strength from the ability to exert a capillary control in the area”, the report stated.

Giuseppe Pisanu, head of the anti-mafia commission, said the Italian mafia was now “silently prospering, moving on from spectacular crimes and massacres to business and politics, with a prudent dose of intimidation and violence in a bid to take over the fundamental role of the state”.

Censis found the highest concentration of people living under the shadow of the mafia, 95.9%, was in the province of Agrigento in Sicily, followed by Naples, at 95%.

The four main mobs in Italy, Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Naples Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and the Puglian Sacra Corona, enjoy an estimated annual turnover of €130bn (£118bn). But they have left a trail of poverty, said Pisanu, pointing out that the 22% of Italians living under the shadow of the mob produced just 14.6% of Italy’s GDP and held just 12.4% of the country’s bank deposits.

In Catania and Palermo 80% of shops allegedly pay protection money, starting from €500 a month.

Suspicious fires, possibly to pressure businesses into paying protection money, in the four regions studied by Censis doubled to 8,441 a year between 1998 and 2007.

Investigators believe Italy’s clans are now investing more of their profits from extortion and drug dealing outside the Italian south, including in building work at the site for Milan’s Expo in 2015.

The Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta are suspected of carving up investments in Rome, with the former focusing on suburban shopping centres and the latter on luxury property and restaurants in the heart of the capital. Despite the stalled Italian economy, a large number of bars in Rome have recently received expensive makeovers, which Pisanu said was probably due to an influx of mob money.

“As we get better at confiscating funds in Italy, the mafias are also getting better at investing overseas,” he said. “The ‘Ndrangheta has even offered to act as a financial services consultant to the Columbian cartels.”

In this July 13, 2009 photo, Sarab village resident and opium addict Islam Beg, center, offers his opium pipe to his grandson after having an early morning smoke in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan. In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families, from toddlers to old men, are addicts. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

AP | Aug 9, 2009

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

SARAB, Afghanistan — Open the door to Islam Beg’s house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It’s just past 8 a.m. and the family of six — including a 1-year-old baby boy — is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.

Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.

Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.

In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families — from toddlers to old men — are addicts. The addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.

Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world’s opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan — 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the U.N. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan’s back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.

Unlike in the West, the close-knit nature of communities here makes addiction a family affair. Instead of passing from one rebellious teenager to another, the habit passes from mother to daughter, father to son. It’s turning villages like this one into a landscape of human depredation.

Except for a few soiled mats, Beg’s house is bare. He has pawned all his family’s belongings to pay for drugs.

“I am ashamed of what I have become,” says Beg, an unwashed turban curled on his head. “I’ve lost my self-respect. I’ve lost my values. I take the food from this child to pay for my opium,” he says, pointing to his 5-year-old grandson, Mamadin. “He just stays hungry.”

Beg’s forefathers owned much of the land in the village, located beside a gushing stream at the end of a canyon of craggy mountains in Badakshan province, hundreds of miles (kilometers) northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.

He once had 1,200 sheep. He sold them off one by one to pay for drugs.

The land followed. He’s turned his spacious home, once lined with ornamental carpets, into a mud shell. He grows potatoes in rows in the last of his fields and each time he harvests the crop, he has to make a choice — feed his grandchildren, or buy opium. He usually chooses drugs.

Basic necessities like soap long ago fell by the wayside.

“If we have 50 cents, we buy opium and we smoke it. We don’t use the 50 cents to buy soap to clean our clothes,” explains Raihan, Beg’s daughter and the mother of the 1-year-old. The toddler wears a filthy shirt and no underwear. “I can be out of food, but not out of opium.”

The country’s few drug treatment centers are in cities far from villages like this one. And even those able to get themselves to the cities are often unable to get help. The drug clinic in Takhar province, the nearest to Sarab, has a waiting list of 2,000 people and only 30 beds.

So the villagers are drowning in opium. They begin taking it when they are sick, relying on its anesthetic properties — opium is also used to make morphine. Sarab, a village located at 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) and snowed in for up to three months a year, is a day’s walk over mountain paths to the nearest hospital. The few shops in town do not even sell aspirin.

“Opium is our doctor,” says Beg. “When your stomach hurts, you take a smoke. Then you take a little more. And a little more. And then, you’re addicted. Once you’re hooked, it’s over. You’re finished.”

When his grandson Shamsuddin, 1, cut his finger in the door jamb, Beg blew opium smoke into the child’s mouth, a common practice in this part of the world which is now resulting in rampant child addiction. He doesn’t want his grandchild to become an addict, but he says he has no choice. “If there is no medicine here, what should we do? The only way to make him feel better is to give him opium.”

From a single smoke, they progress to a three-times-a-day habit that spreads. When Beg began using opium, it wasn’t just his wife and daughter who followed suit. It was his brother. Then his brother’s wife. Like an epidemic, it makes its way across the village.

Health workers say that to treat the addiction, they need to treat the entire community. Last year, the Ministry of Health took 120 addicts from Sarab to a facility in a town one day’s drive away to be treated. Three months later, they found that 115 of the 120 had relapsed.

“First my neighbor started doing opium again,” explains Noor, one of the women treated, whose eyes are dark caves. “Then my cousin. Then my husband. And then after a while, I also started.”

Most of the addicts spend $3 to $4 a day on opium in a part of the world where people earn on average $2. They sell their land and go deeply into debt to maintain their habit.

“I used to be a rich man,” says Dadar, a man who looks to be in his 70s and whose family of seven is addicted. “I had cattle. I had land. And then I started smoking. I sold the cattle. I sold my land. Now I have nothing.”

He wears an old windbreaker encrusted with dirt. His wife pulls back her lips to show a mouth full of diseased teeth. Their grandchildren have knotted hair and ripped clothes stained with muck.

Because they’ve sold their cattle, they no longer eat meat. When they sold the last of their land, they also lost their wheat, potatoes and greens. Their diet now consists of tea and the occasional piece of bread given by a neighbor.

Village chief Sahib Dad says even those who are not addicted are forced to pay a price.

“When a person gets addicted, he has nothing to eat,” says Dad. “That affects his neighbor because the neighbor is forced to give over a part of his food. For this reason, all of us are poorer.”

After selling their land, some families resort to even more desperate measures. They take loans from the shopkeepers who sell them drugs. Then they sell their daughters, known as ‘opium brides,’ to settle the debt. They lease their sons.

“I know he is angry with me. But what can I do? I have nothing left to sell,” says Jan Begum, who has sent her 14-year-old to do construction work for the drug dealers. “I tried to stop, but I can’t. Whenever I do, the pain becomes unbearable.”

The problem is compounded by Afghanistan’s neighbors. Iran immediately to the west has the world’s highest per capita heroin use. The heroin labs there, as well as in Pakistan to the east, use opium imported from Afghanistan. These countries are now exporting heroin addiction back to Afghanistan in the form of returning refugees.

Like opium, heroin in Afghanistan is biting off whole families. Gul Pari, 13, watched her mother get high on heroin when she and her brother were in elementary school. Now she lies in a bed in a drug treatment center for women in Kabul. Her 15-year-old brother Zaihar is across town in a rehab facility for men.

Their bodies are like brittle sticks. The 13-year-old tries to push herself up on one elbow, but her thin arm cannot hold her up, so she falls back onto the pillow. Her emaciated brother leans against a wall to steady himself.

What will happen when they go home is unknown. They live with their mother — a recovering heroin addict — under a tarp in the yard of an abandoned house.

Mohammad Asef, a health worker at the clinic taking care of Zaihar Pari, says he is worried about the boy’s chances of recovering. “In America people go and get high in the park. In Afghanistan, they do it in the home,” says Asef. “They bring it inside. They burn it on the family stove. Everyone sees. So everyone is affected.”

In Sarab, villagers who are not addicted keep their distance from those who are. They don’t invite them into their homes. They discourage them from coming to village meetings. It’s as if they are trying to quarantine themselves.

Beg says that for him all hope is lost. Even after he is buried, it’ll take 70 years for the opium to ooze out of his bones. His hope, he says, are his grandkids — the only people in the family who are not yet addicts.

As Beg is getting high on a recent morning, the 1-year-old crawls over and starts playing with the opium pipe. He picks it up and shakes it, as if it were a rattle. Then, imitating his grandfather, he raises the pipe to his mouth.

Mexican police officers arrested over murder of federal agents

Ten Mexican police officers have been arrested over the torture and murder of 12 federal agents who were investigating a drugs cartel.

Telegraph | Jul 19, 2009

By Tom Leonard

Prosecutors in the western state of Michoacán said the municipal policemen had been detained to “determine their responsibility” for the murders and for allegedly carried out “criminal acts” on behalf of a ruthless drug gang called La Familia Michoacana.

Corruption is rife among Mexico’s local police forces and officers have not only protected cartels, but also murdered their rivals.

But the killing of the 12 agents, whose bodies were found piled beside a road long with warning notes, showed the cartels were becoming more willing to attack the federal government.

La Familia, a particularly violent group whose members study a special Bible and claim to be evangelical Christians, had the agents killed apparently in revenge for the arrest of Arnoldo Rueda Medina, one of their leaders.

Around 5,500 troops, federal police and navy personnel are being sent into Michoacán, the home state of President Felipe Calderón.

La Familia is a relatively new cartel which announced itself in 2006 by rolling five severed heads on to a bar’s dance floor.

A man claiming to be Servando Gomez, its leader, called a local television station last week and said he was attacking government forces simply to defend his members’ families and friends.

Mr Calderón believes that the cartel’s recent violence shows it has been damaged by the government’s campaign.

Washington Examiner | Apr 29, 2009

By Bill Myers

Drug-addicted veterans are being injected with cocaine by researchers at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in taxpayer-funded studies, The Examiner has learned.

The study subjects are being given the injections as part of a search for medicines that researchers hope will block cocaine absorption in the body, said Timothy O’Leary, the VA’s acting director of research and development.

All the subjects were recruited because they were addicted to cocaine, O’Leary said. About 40 volunteers — most of them veterans — are being given injections at VA labs in Kansas City and San Antonio, he added.

Hundreds of veterans have apparently been used as human subjects in the past decade, according to records and interviews with officials.

The VA has handed over several other abstracts from studies over the past decade, and O’Leary said his agency has been conducting such research for at least 25 years.

O’Leary said that the subjects’ safety was paramount. But documents of a decade-old study that tested morphine on veterans found nearly 800 “adverse events” from anorexia to heart tremors.

Last month, The Examiner reported that the federal government had spent millions of taxpayer dollars to give addicts drugs such as crack and intravenous cocaine as well as morphine and other opiates in publicly funded clinical studies. The VA documents and interviews suggest that the programs have been even more widespread than previously suspected.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, more than 6,000 licenses have been given to scientists to use otherwise illegal drugs in their experiments. DEA officials declined to hand over their records.

O’Leary said the studies were desperately needed to find ways to treat addiction. An estimated 140,000 vets suffer from drug addiction, according to VA officials.

“As you know, there are a lot of people out there who suffer from addictions. It’s a huge societal problem,” O’Leary said in a phone interview.

Critics say that experimenting on addicts runs contrary to ethical guidelines on “informed consent.” The doctrine requires that human laboratory subjects understand the risks of the experiment and can say no. For at least 20 years, scientists have recognized that addiction is a disease, which means that addicts can’t simply say no.

Pressure is mounting on the government to come clean about its drug experiments.

“How many ways can the government get it wrong?” Cato Institute scholar Tim Lynch asked The Examiner.

Compared with the CIA’s former habit of testing dangerous drugs on unwilling volunteers, these programs are “an improvement if the research deals with volunteers and full disclosure of the risks involved,” Lynch said. “But it is not clear to me why the government has to subsidize such research.”

U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said through a spokesman that he was “closely reviewing” the matter.

O’Leary said that the cocaine injections in San Antonio and Kansas City were being given in “extremely controlled conditions,” but when asked to detail what he meant by that phrase, he said he wasn’t familiar with those labs.

VA officials have not acted on a Freedom of Information Act request for access to their files.

Trucks waiting to cross the US border at Nogales. Photo: David Sanders Arizona Daily Star

Mexican Cartels Using Huge Fleet of 18-Wheelers, Only 5% Inspected at Border Crossing

ABC | Apr 16, 2009

By RICHARD ESPOSITO, ASA ESLOCKER, and BRIAN ROSS

Most of the drug shipments smuggled into the United States by the Mexican cartels are hidden in trucks that drive across U.S. border checkpoints in plain sight, with little fear of inspection, U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

Only about 5 percent of trucks coming into the country from Mexico are inspected, according to U.S. officials.

“It is just too costly and too slow given the volume of trucks to actually try to stop and inspect each and every truck,” said Juan Zarate who dealt with the issue in the Geroge W. Bush White House as Deputy National Security Director.

The number of trucks coming into the U.S. has steadily increased since the passage of NAFTA in 1993. Almost 3,000,000 loaded container trailers crossed at border checkpoints last year.

“It does open up the potential for drug networks to take advantage, but I think it is something we have to find alternative ways of addressing,” said Zarate.

Any attempt to inspect all trucks crossing the border, “would have a hugely negative impact in terms of commercial traffic and trade between the United States and Mexico,” said Zarate, who also held the position of Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism.

“You would see lines like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

The Mexican cartels’ fleet of 18-wheelers has long since replaced the Caribbean air drops and speed boats used by the Colombian cartels in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the era of “Miami Vice”.

And major cities at interstate highway junctions, like Atlanta, have become important hubs for the Mexican cartels.

“Atlanta is a central trans-shipment point for pushing narcotics to some of the largest distribution cells in the United States,” said Rodney Benson, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in Atlanta.

Drug Agents Stakeout Truck Stops and Trail 18 Wheelers

Instead of tracking fancy sports cars at glitzy night clubs in Miami, federal drug agents now spend a lot of their time trailing behind huge 18-wheel trucks and conducting surveillance at interstate truck stops.

Flying over Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction,” the intersection of interstates I-85 and I-285, Benson pointed out the truck stops and warehouses where his agents have made major arrests and drugs seizures.

“It’s also a major money collection point,” said Benson. “They do operate with a business-like efficiency,” he said.

Federal agents and local police say the Mexican cartels often rent homes in quiet, upscale suburban neighborhoods for their operatives.

“You couldn’t build a better environment to camouflage this activity,” said Gwinnett County district attorney Danny Porter.

In a major raid last week, aimed at the Atlanta operations of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, police and federal agents raided 16 locations and arrested 21 people.

Nearby residents were shocked to learn their neighbors might be connected to the Mexican cartels.

“Their daughter goes to school with my daughter,” said Amber Youngblood of Duluth, Georgia. “It makes you think twice about who your neighbors are,” she said.

Retired soldiers tapped to run police forces

MSNBC | Apr 1, 2009

By Steve Fainaru and William Booth

ETATLAN, Mexico – President Felipe Calderón is rapidly escalating the Mexican army’s role in the war against drug traffickers, deploying nearly 50 percent of its combat-ready troops along the U.S-Mexico border and throughout the country, while retired army officers take command of local police and the military supplies civilian authorities with automatic weapons and grenades.

U.S. and Mexican officials describe the drug cartels as a widening narco-insurgency. The four major drug states average a total of 12 murders a day, characterized by ambushes, gun battles, executions and decapitated bodies left by the side of the road. In the villages and cities where the traffickers hold sway, daily life now takes place against a martial backdrop of round-the-clock patrols, pre-dawn raids and roadblocks manned by masked young soldiers.

Calderón’s deployment of about 45,000 troops to fight the cartels represents a historic change. Previous administrations relied on Mexico’s traditionally weak police agencies to combat the traffickers who funnel 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States. The cartels corrupted local authorities and reached tacit agreements with the national government, limiting the violence while the drugs continued to flow.

After Calderón became president in December 2006, he told Mexicans that the use of the military against the cartels would be limited and brief. But it is now the centerpiece of his anti-narcotics strategy, according to interviews with senior U.S. and Mexican officials and dozens of people on the front lines of the war.

“It can be traumatic to have the army in control of public security, but I am convinced that we don’t have a better alternative, even with all the risks that it implies,” said Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior public security official who is overseeing the overhaul of Mexico’s police forces.

The military’s withdrawal is dependent on the success of the police reforms, according to the government. U.S. and Mexican officials predict that troops will be patrolling the streets for years. In many regions, the army has become the law. But rather than quelling the violence, it increasingly appears to have been drawn into a deepening morass of cartel rivalries, local political disputes and blood feuds.

In the southern state of Guerrero, the army ratcheted up security last year, killing several alleged drug traffickers and making dozens of arrests. That was followed by a two-month stretch in which nine soldiers were abducted and decapitated in the state capital, four policemen were incinerated in a daylight grenade attack near a beach resort and a former mayor was shot 24 times before 1,000 people packed into a plaza for the coronation of a town beauty queen.

Mexicans have greeted the unprecedented deployment of federal troops in their communities with a mix of gratitude and dismay.

“There are a lot of opinions. I personally feel more secure to see the army out in the streets,” said Denis González Sánchez, a 29-year-old city administrator in Petatlan, a Guerrero beach town of 30,000 where the army began patrols last year after three dozen gunmen massacred the family of a former mayor accused of links to traffickers. “A lot of people feel exactly the opposite: They say that the army is making us less secure. But I always think it’s better knowing that they are out there protecting us, that they are watching over us, when there is nobody else to do it.”

Mexican officials say the cartels operate on a $10 billion annual budget earned from drug sales in the United States; according to U.S. government estimates, they employ 150,000 people. This year, the Mexican government will spend $9.3 billion on national security, a 99 percent increase since Calderón took office.

Since December 2006, more than 10,100 people have been killed in the strife, including 917 police officers, soldiers, prosecutors and political leaders, according to Milenio, a Mexican media organization. At the same time, human rights complaints against the army have surged 576 percent, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, including allegations of unlawful detentions, forced disappearances, rape and torture.

A ‘courageous step’

Calderón and his advisers have described the military’s deployment as an emergency measure while he seeks to reform Mexico’s local, state and federal police. He has promised that when the new police forces are ready, the troops will return to their barracks. That process may take until the end of his six-year term in 2012, he said recently.

The government is attempting to vet and retrain 450,000 officers, most at the state and municipal levels, employing lie detectors, drug tests, psychological profiling and financial reviews to weed out corruption and incompetence. Nearly half of the 56,000 officers vetted so far have failed.

MSNBC | Mar 14, 2009

By Holly LaFon

A displeased Gov. Rick Perry spoke out Thursday against Barack Obama’s rejection of his request last month for 1,000 more “boots on the ground” (meaning 1,000 troops, since 1,000 boots only equals 500 people) to be sent to the Texas-Mexico border.

He requested the aid to help keep the growing drug cartel violence in Mexico from spilling into the United States.

Obama told a group of reporters that he did not feel troops were necessary, but would consider in what cases National Guard deployments would be effective.

Perry, on the same day that he rejected stimulus unemployment funds from the federal government, saying that “[Texas] can take care of itself,” told Fox News that, “Washington has been an abject failure at defending our border.”

At a House panel meeting on Thursday to decide what measures Homeland Security Department should take to secure the border, Homeland Security official Roger Rufe agreed with President Obama’s assertion that deploying troops should only come as a last resort, in the off chance that other resources such as DoD and the National Guard were expended.

Many officials in border cities have applauded Obama’s decision not to use extreme measures such as sending troops. Patricio Ahumeda, mayor of Brownsville, Texas, openly criticized Perry’s plan, calling him out of touch with what is really going on.

“I appreciate and support Obama’s decision not to militarize the border because troops aren’t trained for this sort of thing. There was an incident where a national guard killed a shepherd in the El Paso area. It doesn’t work. The training is not the same. We’re not at war, and the violence and incidents that are occurring over there are not daily and are not spilling over here yet.”

He also pointed out that the crime rates in Brownsville and El Paso are significantly less than many other large cities. While El Paso had 418 violent crimes in 2007, Austin, Texas, had 540, and Washington D. C. had 1,347.

Meanwhile, just across the border, bodies are piling up in Mexico as the violent situation in places such as Ciudad Juarez has grown dire. The drug-related death toll reached 6,290 people last year, and has already hit 1,000 in the first two months of 2009.

The morgue and crime lab in Juarez has seven doctors, and two were hired in the last two weeks, to help with the onslaught of cases. Other morgues have been attacked at gunpoint, drug traffickers knowing investigators use the cadavers to help track the perpetrators.

Mayor Ahumeda believes the best thing Texas can do is work with Mexico and President Calderon to stop the violence.

“Texas needs to work with Mexico to prevent guns and ammunition from crossing the border and reduce the demand for drugs,” he said. “They’re not doing enough in that respect. I don’t mean pick them up and throw away the key. I mean going after those people in the United States, the criminals who are preying on young people who are hooked, and get them treatment, and teach our kids to stay off of drugs.”

Maybe he secretly wants the troops so Texas can secede from the union.