spiritsoup's Blog

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, July 7, 2008

Bombing raises questions about the CIA, ISI and the Afghanistan opium trade

Afghanistan’s interior ministry has accused a “foreign intelligence agency” of being behind today’s deadly suicide bombing that ripped apart the country’s Indian embassy in Kabul, killing 41 people. Could the event represent another “false flag” run by American intelligence as a means of maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan and control of the country’s lucrative opium trade?

A further 141 were injured when the bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into two diplomatic vehicles entering the embassy and the blast also devastated nearby shops and buildings.

“The interior ministry believes this attack was carried out in coordination and consultation with an active intelligence service in the region,” the ministry said in a statement.

"Afghanistan has previously accused Pakistani agents of being behind a number of attacks on its soil,” according to a London Guardian report, referring to the notorious Pakistani ISI intelligence agency.

As Jane’s Information Group notes, “The CIA has well-established links with the ISI, having trained it in the 1980s to ‘run’ Afghan mujahideen (holy Muslim warriors), Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan as well as Arab volunteers by providing them with arms and logistic support to evict the Soviet occupation of Kabul.”

“Opium cultivation and heroin production in Pakistan’s northern tribal belt and neighboring Afghanistan was also a vital offshoot of the ISI-CIA co-operation. It succeeded not only in turning Soviet troops into addicts, but also in boosting heroin sales in Europe and the US through an elaborate web of well-documented deceptions, transport networks, couriers and payoffs. This, in turn, offset the cost of the decade-long anti-Soviet ‘unholy war’ in Afghanistan.”

Could the Kabul bombing be a joint ISI-CIA false flag for the purposes of creating a pretext for the continued presence of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, control of the booming opium drugs trade and the construction of permanent military bases?

As we reported last month, Middle East sources indicated that U.S. forces gave the green light for the Taliban to attack a government prison in Kandahar on June 13th, and stood idly by while Taliban fighters violently freed more than 1000 inmates.

According to some observers, the recent apparent resurgence of the Taliban has been encouraged by NATO and the U.S. as a bulwark against political pressure and calls for troops to leave the country.

Without an enemy to fight, there would be no justification for a continued U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan. There would be no more weapons sales contracts and no more rebuilding contracts for Halliburton. Opium cultivation would fall back into the hands of warlords and the Taliban, who banned production before the U.S. invasion in 2001, after which heroin flooded the streets of the U.S. and UK in record numbers as cultivation soared 50 per cent year on year. Afghanistan now exports upwards of 92 per cent of the world’s supply of opium, which is used to make heroin. Not to mention the plethora of pharmaceuticals that are pushed almost non-stop via television and magazine adds.
You would have had to have had your head in the sand for decades to not know how long this industry has been in bed with our Federal government.

Have doubts of U.S government involvement in drug smuggling? In this piece of footage from 60 minutes from 1993, Mike Wallace interviews former head of the DEA, Ron Bonners regarding cocaine smuggling by the CIA.

And if you are thinking, "Well, that was a long time ago," here's a story that got next to no MSM time from a more recent date, December, 2007.

As Professor Michel Chossudovsky writes, “U.S. military presence has served to restore rather than eradicate the drug trade.”

“Implemented in 2000-2001, the Taliban’s drug eradication program led to a 94 percent decline in opium cultivation. In 2001, according to UN figures, opium production had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately following the October 2001 US led invasion, production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels.”

“Based on wholesale and retail prices in Western markets, the earnings generated by the Afghan drug trade are colossal. In July 2006, street prices in Britain for heroin were of the order of Pound Sterling 54, or $102 a gram,” Chossudovsky notes.

The necessity for continued violence in Afghanistan exists just like it does in Iraq, for the pretext of justifying an endless military occupation and the opportunity to build military bases that will be used as launch pads for future wars, as is now being discussed for Iraq.

As we have highlighted in the past, links between Taliban leadership and the U.S. military-industrial complex are documented.

As Seymour Hersh reported in January 2002, at the height of the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban fighters “accidentally” ended up on U.S. organized special safety corridor airlifts right before the fall of Kunduz.

The Taliban itself was a creation of the CIA having been set up and bankrolled by the U.S. in tandem with Pakistan’s ISI.

“In the 1980s, the CIA provided some $5 billion in military aid for Islamic fundamentalist rebels fighting the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, but scaled down operations after Moscow pulled out in 1989. However, Selig Harrison of the DC-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars recently told a conference in London that the CIA created the Taliban “monster” by providing some $3 billion for the ultra-fundamentalist militia in their 1994-6 drive to power,” reported the Times of India.