Reply #69: Arms, Opium, Oil, Corruption, Israel, CIA, Xe, individual & corp greed

[unc70]

Follow the money, and the power and the control. What powerful interests are benefiting from the policy? Who are the winners and losers? Which powerful groups are using Afghanistan as a proxy for larger conflicts among the groups?

War is good for business, at least for those arming and supplying the combatants on all sides and for those allied with the "winners" and thus gain the highly profitable contracts to rebuild and redevelop, including industries like oil, construction, mining, etc.

In many ways, Afghanistan is another chapter in the Opium Wars that started centuries ago. Opium and cocaine production around the world is highly correlated with where our (US and often UK) armies and the CIA are most active. Enormous profits for those involved: corrupt officials, smugglers, war lords "taxing" transit routes along the way (mostly via Turkey), the distribution cartels, the military and police agencies tasked with stopping the drugs, the banks laundering the money, and finally those who depend on selling goods and services to various groups along the entire path.

Karzai is typical of the kind of leader that US commercial interests generally help bring to "power" using the US Army and Marines as the "muscle" and the CIA and worse to destablize the incumbent government, economy, institutions, media, and elections of the target country using all available means.

While Karzai presented well on TV to US voters, he lack the kinds of instituions used by your typical military strongman - an elite military unit loyal to the leader and usually members of his tribal or ethnic group; a secret police spying on and feared by everyone; a patronage system that controls access to education, jobs, government contracts, housing, etc.; and large amounts of public monies (from oil, illegal drugs, diamonds...) under his complete control.

Karzai is somewhat like having Chalabi trying to run all of Iraq, not just the oil ministry in Iraq. Karzai controls some of the aid monies from the US and others and a minimal patronage system. barely more than cronyism. US attempts at creating a national army for him began almost as soon as we invaded Afghanistan, but these efforts have repeatedly failed. I think increased number of US troops deployed there was in response to the US concluding that it would take decades to build an adequate Afghan army, so one was ordered up and delivered from the US. This further weakens Karzai and makes him look even more a puppet of the US, a collaborator with the occupying army. Karzai will be lucky if his fate is no worse than that of Noriega.

Israeli entities, public and private, are in the middle of all this as a major supplier of military and intelligence/spy technologies to the US and others in the region, and as a partner with arms dealers, smugglers, bankers, network providers and government officials in Turkey, Lebanon, Dubai, and in the past in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Elements within the CIA and in related blackops groups are operating outside normal oversight and restrictions. Many of these elements have ties to Operation Gladio and similar groups around the world, including many in the MSM. Nothing new about this, remember the close ties between the CIA and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post and the strange connections between them and JFK and his assassination.

Xe/Blackwater is a particularly interesting case when one looks past the obvious. Lots of evidence and disclosures document Blackwater receiving large no-bid contracts from State and Defense Departments with highly inflated bids producing large piles of money for Blackwater, with most details hidden under claims of "national security".

What most people fail to see is what then happens to all that money, all those Blackwater/Xe profits. They all belong to one man, Erik Prince, the sole owner of Xe. Taxpayer "largesse" has magically transformed into personal wealth which Prince uses to to fund many RW candidates, causes, and groups including the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.

Lots of other players in this mess: IN and PK supporting competing factions, the Afghan refugees forced into camps just inside PK; the remanents of BCCI, Enron, Iran-Contra, Operation Gladio, and many more return to haunt us.