[1] Five of the current candidates for Afghan president are U.S., S, citizens. The Independent (January 23, 2009) has reported that Washington is searching for a “dream ticket” to oust the incumbent and former favorite, Hamid Karzai, now condemned as corrupt. PressTV goes farther: “Washington is using its political clout to influence the outcome of the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan, a report says. The US embassy in Kabul has urged Afghanistan's leading presidential hopefuls to withdraw from the race in favor of Ali Ahmad Jalali – a candidate that is more preferred by Washington, reported Pakistan's Ummat daily. In return, US officials have promised to guarantee key positions for the three candidates – which include finance minister Ashraf Ghani, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and political activist Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi – in the next Afghan government. The move received instant condemnation as flagrant US interference in Afghan politics and internal affairs. Jalali – who is viewed as the main rival of President Hamed Karzai in the August presidential elections – is a US citizen and former Afghan minister of the interior. His candidacy is seen as a direct violation of the Chapter Three, Article Sixty Two of Afghanistan's Constitution, which states that only an Afghan citizen has the right to run for president - which means that Jalali would have to apply for Afghan citizenship first. Zalmay Khalilzad and Ashraf Ghani, two other candidates vying for presidency, also hold US citizenship” (link).

[2] Jeffrey Ira Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 71; S. E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884-1885 (London: Longmans, 1942), 177.

[3] Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), 154.

[4] Railways approach Afghanistan from the north, easy, south, and west. The only two with foothold terminals in Afghanistan itself are those built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

[5] Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. Harrison heard about the program in 1975 from the Shah's Ambassador to the United Nations, “who pointed to it proudly as an example of Iranian-American cooperation.”

[6] See discussion in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 73-75, 117-22.

[7] Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 163.

[8] M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia: From the Opium Trade to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 188. According to a contemporary account, Americans and Europeans star ted becoming involved in drug smuggling out of Afghanistan from the early 1970s; see Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti, The International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 190–92.

[9] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2001), 447.

[10] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 458; Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 148 (labs); Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South Asia, 189 (ISI).

[11] Before 1979 little Afghan opium or heroin reached markets beyond Pakistan and Iran (McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 469-71).

[12] USA Today, January 12, 2009.

[13] Newsweek, Apr 7, 2008.

[14] Cf. S. Hasan Asad, “Shadow economy and Pakistan's predicament,” Economic Review [Pakistan], April, 1994.

[15] Financial Times, November 29, 2001.

[16] Times of India, November 29, 1999.

[17] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 320.

[18] Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 427.

[19] James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), 154, 160-63.

[20] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

[21] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (Washington: Brassey's, 2004), 9. On December 4, 2001, Asia Times reported that a convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi, was also released from prison to participate in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (link); Scott, Road to 9/11, 125.

[22] Bernd Debusmann, “Obama and the Afghan Narco-state,” Reuters, January 29th, 2009.

[23] Guardian, April 7, 2006, Independent, April 13, 2006, San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 2006.

[24] Independent (London), April 13, 2006; James Nathan, “Ending the Taliban's money stream; U.S. should buy Afghanistan's opium,” Washington Times, January 8, 2009.

[25] Afghanistan News, December 23, 2005.

[26] Independent, March 9, 2009. When Obama visited Afghanistan in 2008, Gul Agha Sherzai was the first Afghan leader he met. The London Observer reported on July 21, 2002, that in order to secure his acceptance of the new Karzai government, Gul Agha Sherzai, along with other warlords, had “been ‘bought off’ with millions of dollars in deals brokered by US and British intelligence.”

[27] Mark Corcoran, Australian Broadcasting Company, 2008. “In an affidavit in his criminal case, he traced a history of cooperating with U.S. officials, including the CIA, dating to 1990. In early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai said he turned over to the U.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons, including ”four hundred anti-aircraft missiles of Russian, American and British manufacture“ (Tom Burghardt, ”The Secret and (Very) Profitable World of Intelligence and Narcotrafficking,“ DissidentVoice, January 2nd, 2009, link). Cf. Risen, State of War, 165-66.

[28] USA Today, October 26, 2004.

[29] Washington Post, December 27, 2008; New York Sun, January 29, 2008, http://www.nysun.com/foreign/justice-dept-eyes-us-firms-payments-to-afghan/70371/..

[30] New York Times, November 23, 1996; cf. November 20, 1993.

[31] Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela's Hugo Chávez?” Global Research, April 19, 2007.

[32] New York Times, November 23, 1996.

[33] Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1996. The information about the drug activities of Guillen Davila and François had been published in the U.S. press years before the indictments. It is possible that, had it not been for the controversy aroused by Gary Webb's Contracocaine stories in the August 1996 San Jose Mercury, these two men and their networks might have been as untouchable as other kingpins in the global CIA drug connection whom we shall discuss, such Miguel Nassar Haro in Mexico.

[34] Washington Post.

[35] Philip Giraldi, “Found in Translation: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets,” The American Conservative, January 28, 2008. Others have written about the ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkish narco-intelligence connection; see e.g. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005. 224-41; Martin A. Lee, “Turkey's Drug-Terrorism Connection,” ConsortiumNews, January 25th, 2008.

[36] London Sunday Times, January 6, 2008: “‘If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,‘ she said.”

[37] Huffington Post, January 6, 2008.

[38] Risen, State of War, 154.

[39] Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 90-97: “While the ISI trained Islamist insurgents and supplied arms, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, several Gulf states and the Taliban funded them…Each month, an estimated 4-6 metric tons of heroin are shipped from Turkey via the Balkans to Western Europe” (90, 96).

[40] Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), x-xi.

[41] International Herald Tribune, January 25, 2009. Cf. Daily Telegraph (London), January 26, 2009.

[42] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 16, 191.

[43] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 93, 431. After the final American withdrawal in 1975, Laotian production continued to rise, thanks to the organizational efforts of Khun Sa, a drug trafficker whom Thailand was relying on as protection against the Communists in Burma and Vientiane. (McCoy, 428-31)

[44] Peter Dale Scott, “Honduras, the Contra Support Networks, and Cocaine: How the U.S. Government Has Augmented America's Drug Crisis,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Alan A. Block, eds., War on Drugs: Studies in the Failure of U. S. Narcotic Policy (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 126 –27. I presented these remarks at a University of Wisconsin conference.

[45] International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1999. Released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., March 2000. Production has since decreased, but is still well above 1990 levels.

[46] Richard Holbrooke, “Breaking the Narco-State.” Washington Post, January 23, 2008.

[47] I use “jihadi salafism,” an admittedly clumsy expression, in place of the more frequently encountered “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism” – both of which terms confer upon jihadi salafism a sense of legitimacy and long-time history which I do not believe it deserves. The jihadi salafism I am talking about, with roots in Wahhabism and Deobandism, can be seen in part as a response to British and American influence in India and the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden points to the earlier example of Imam Taki al-Din ibn Taymiyyah in the thirteenth century, but ibn Taymiyyah's jihadism was in reaction to the Mongol ravaging of Baghdad in 1258. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, history abundantly shows that “outside interventions are likely if not certain, in any culture, to produce reactions that are violent, xenophobic, and desirous of returning to a mythically pure past” (Scott, Road to 9/11, 260-61).

[48] Richard Holbrooke, “Breaking the Narco-State.” Washington Post, January 23, 2008.

[49] Holbrooke, “Breaking the Narco-State.”

[50] David Corn, “Holbrooke Calls for ”Complete Rethink“ of Drugs in Afghanistan,” Mother Jones Mojo.

[51] “'By forced eradication we are often pushing farmers into the Taleban hands,' Mr Holbrooke said. ‘We are going to try to reprogramme that money. About $160 million is for alternate livelihoods and we would like to increase that’” (London Times, March 23, 2009, link).

[52] Guardian, March 24, 2009.

[53] NewsHour, PBS, March 27, 2009. Cf. Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 2009.

[54] “Obama's [May] 2009 [supplementary] war budget sheds light on the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. …The Department of Defense states that funding for the Afghanistan War will increase to $46.9 billion in 2009, a 31 percent rise over the $35.9 billion in 2008 and the $32.6 billion in 2007…. This $11.3 billion increase includes an additional $2.8 billion for the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund, $400 million for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund and $4.4 billion for MRAPs designed for use in Afghanistan. Increased troop levels will also account for a portion of the increase” (Jeff Leys, “Analyzing Obama's War Budget Numbers,” Truthout, May 4, 2009, link).

[55] “Further Military Commitment in Afghanistan May Be Toughest Sell Yet,” Fox News, March 25, 2009. In a little-noted speech on October 17, 2008, Holbrooke also predicted that the war in Afghanistan would become “the longest in American history,” surpassing even Vietnam (NYU School of Law News, link).

[56] TheEndRun, April 6, 2009.

[57] RAND Corporation, “How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for Countering al Qa'ida,” Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008).

[58] Gilles Dorronsoro, “Focus and Exit: an Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009.

[59] Orange County Register, March 30, 2009.

[60] “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” DefenseLink, emphasis added.

[61] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001; quoted in David Michael Smith, “The U.S. War in Afghanistan,” The Canadian, April 19, 2006. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 169-70.

[62] Christian Science Monitor, April 8, 2009.

[63] Cf. “Holbrooke of South Asia,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2009.