In the wake of heartbreaking scenes of unmitigated chaos coming out of Kabul, Americans shouldn’t be asking themselves how this could happen again, or why our vaunted intelligence agencies once again failed to predict this totally predictable human catastrophe.

No, the question Americans should be asking is: WHERE IS THE CIA GOING TO GET THEIR HEROIN NOW?

I mean, how could the world’s sole superpower have fought continuously for twenty years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,400 soldiers, spending more than $2 trillion on its military operations while lavishing [a record] $100 billion more on ‘nation-building,’ – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations?

The answer is simple: the US occupation was never about fighting terrorism, nation-building or “restoring democracy.” It was about cornering the heroin market. Throughout its two decades in Afghanistan, America’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the US has fueled corruption in the country through deliveries of literally BALES of cash to Afghan power brokers via a system of bribes and other incentives to ensure US troops remained fed and supplied. Absurdly, the US government has spent billions bribing the Taliban not to attack convoys supplying troops sent to fight the Taliban…

But the vast majority of the $2.3 trillion the US government has spent for the war has gone not to Afghans – corrupt or otherwise – but to US military contractors. It’s estimated that 80–90% of US outlays in Afghanistan ended up back in the US as a massive wealth transfer from taxpayers to private contractors and weapons manufacturers, which have seen their profits soar.

What we are seeing in Afghanistan is the final death-knell of “nation-building” through the barrel of a gun. The idea that we can transform the entire world to our liking was always a dangerous illusion, especially when the real reason for these interventions has been to corner the global drug trade.

So much for nation-building; there wasn’t much of a nation to begin with – there was an impoverished country where millions of dollars were spent on bribes…only to have the funds vanish into the Swiss bank accounts of our Afghan “allies.”

After 20 long years, nearly 2,400 casualties and $2 trillion dollars of American taxpayer’s money wasted, the argument by some Democrats that a full pullout endangers the rights of Afghan women is clearly not what US and NATO soldiers have been protecting with their presence.

When the US invaded Afghanistan, claiming retribution for the Taliban’s [imaginary] role in aiding Osama bin Laden in the 911 US attacks, the Taliban had reduced opium harvests to almost zero.

Following the October 2001 invasion and the Taliban defeat, opium markets were magically restored. Prices soared. By early 2002, the domestic price of opium in Afghanistan was almost 10 times higher than in 2000. The US-led invasion successfully restored the drug trade in the country. The Guardian reported, “In 2007, Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.”

That was six years into the US occupation…

Under puppet president Hamid Karzai [2001 to 2014], opium crops returned to record levels. One of the most notorious opium warlords at the time was the president’s own BROTHER, Mahmoud. In 2009, the New York Times reported that “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…”

Mahmoud Karzai was gunned down by his own bodyguard in 2011.

DynCorp was one of the biggest contractors in Afghanistan. As of 2019, DynCorp had received more than $7 billion in US government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in the country. One of the supposed tasks of DynCorp and other US mercenaries in Afghanistan was to “oversee” destruction of Afghan poppy fields that supply 93% of the world’s heroin. Yet the clear evidence is that that opium and its global distribution has been a major province of the CIA, along with US Special Forces who guarantee secure air transport through airbases in Kyrgyzstan and into western heroin markets.

By 2017 the opium production in Afghanistan had reached a record 9,000 tons…after more than 16 years of US military occupation. The CIA and related private military contractors like DynCorp appear to be in the middle of it.

Alas, DynCorp has had little to show for their drug eradication efforts…if that was indeed their mission…ha, ha!

And the flow of illicit drugs from the region has continued to rise. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in its Afghanistan Opium Survey 2020 report that the “area under opium poppy cultivation increased by 37 percent” from 2019 to 2020.

In addition to being the world’s number one opium supplier, Afghanistan is now the largest producer of hashish, producing between 1,500 and 3,500 tons annually, thanks to the CIA and its minions.

While Washington and the CIA have always denied supporting the huge Afghan opium trade, the CIA’s history of collusion with drug lords since the Vietnam War suggests otherwise. As Alfred McCoy documented in his groundbreaking book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, the CIA was in cahoots with the Hmong tribesmen in Laos and Cambodia who were involved in the opium trade. They claimed it was necessary to win ‘hearts and minds.’

Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] subsequently implicated the CIA’s complicity in secretly shipping opium out of the ‘Golden Triangle’ [encompassing Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia] and onto the streets of America’s inner cities.

But let’s face it: lying about war is as American as apple pie.

Another reason why it’s all gone to shit is because the CIA and the private contractors, for all their billions of dollars of US tax money spent on ‘security’ and ‘nation building’ – are just a bunch of entitled morons with absolutely zero understanding of the countries, histories and people they are dealing with; and even less of empathy or care for the vast majority of people all over the world who simply want to live in peace.

Since WWII, the primary motivation behind US foreign policy hasn’t been to “restore democracy” or for “humanitarian” purposes.  No, America’s primary goal has been to open up new markets for the US and its allies to exploit, and that includes illicit drugs. The capitalist economic model demands ever-growing markets, and that is why the West has been throwing everything they can muster at opening up the rest of the world to a ‘free-market’ economy. The global opium trade fits neatly into this model.

Mainstream economists argue that throwing away $2 trillion is not a very successful capitalist endeavor. But the Afghan war transferred shitloads of money to military contractors such as Dyncorp, Raytheon, Halliburton and Bechtel. That is surely the idea behind capitalism: to get the state to serve capital.

Thousands of contractors literally made a killing in Afghanistan. Armed guards made up to $2000 a day, all paid for with US tax dollars.

It’s sad to see that we’ve made the same mistakes all over again. Even worse, the people making these “mistakes” are old enough to remember Vietnam…and the debacle in Iraq, for that matter! If there’s one thing that the last twenty years has shown, however, it’s that long-term planning is very low on the agenda of the Military-Industrial Complex [MIC].

The MIC has become a system of legalized corruption revolving around entrenched incentives to wage endless war for financial and political gain. If we don’t end this system and the corrupting belief that war is a legitimate and useful policy tool, the USA will keep fighting endless wars.

The American public rarely gets to feel the pain of war. Vietnam was fine as long as the dying was limited to mostly Black and Brown people from the ghetto. Only when the white suburban middle class boys started coming home in body bags did the tide of public opinion finally change…

In any case, the MIC doing its part to ensure a Donald tRump victory in 2024 by creating this huge foreign policy “failure” to flog Biden over the head with for the next 3 years.

This is what happens when your entire foreign policy is based on bribery, institutionalized corruption, and drug running.

A totally predictable outcome.