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Submitted January 21, 2005 - 11:51 am by Don Henry Ford Jr.
Journalist's death dredges up dark legacy of CIA's drug-fueled wars

2005-01-20
By Bill Weinberg

On Jan. 6, a soldier from Afghanistan's nascent national army was killed, along with two assailants, when troops were sent in to eradicate an opium field in Uruzgan province. The central government of President Hamid Karzai recognizes that these could prove the opening shots of a new opium war. A month earlier, on Dec. 11, Karzai's finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times, "Where Democracy's Greatest Enemy Is a Flower," pleading for international support for crop-substitution programs. Opium is the key to power for Afghanistan's warlords, who still control much of the country.

It would be impolitic for Karzai's government to remind his U.S. underwriters of Washington's own complicity in creating this reality. The apparent December suicide of Gary Webb, the journalist responsible for the "Dark Alliance" sensation in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, sparked at least a brief media recollection of the contra-cocaine claims of the Reagan era. That a CIA-backed rebel army was also turning to the drug trade at that same time in Afghanistan seems almost entirely forgotten. . .

(more at link)

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