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Weekly Review And Open Thread 2017-45
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Dec 4 – Yemen Without Saleh
The unexpected end of Yemen's former president Saleh was followed by a Houthi campaign against his functionaries in Sanaa. At the same time the Saudi and UAE proxy forces in south-Yemen renewed their attacks towards Sanaa. The Houthi need to hold back on revenge against Saleh followers and concentrate on defense against the advancing enemy forces.
Dec 5 – Slapstick In Kiev
Saakashvili escaped the police, first by fleeing over the roofs of Kiev and then by being freed from a police car through the help of his supporters. He has since been apprehended again and is now in jail. No noise was heard from those foreign powers who supported the 2014 coup in Kiev. Only a few neocons still seem to hope that Saakashvili can play a role in their games. But without a big push from outside in favor of Saak the nazis and oligarchs that rule Kiev will let him rot in jail. That would a well deserved end of his career.
Dec 6 – Trump Settles Debt With Zionists – Confirms That Iran's Struggle Is Righteous
The "Arab leaders", aka the Gulf sheiks, have been mostly mum about Trump's prostration to the Zionists. The mildly criticizes his Jerusalem decision but took no action at all. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and leaders of militia in Iraq and Syria have publicly shown some backbone and called fro active resistance. They have a long-term strategy of building up forces to tackle Israel. The decisive action following from Trump's remarks on Jerusalem is still years away.
Dec 7 – Republican 'Deficit Hawks'
Republican's betray their voters. Nothing new here, so do the Democrats. A welcome side-effect of the whole Russia-gate theater is to detract from the Democrats support for the Republican agenda.
Dec 8 – Trump Is Bashing The 'Salvator Saudi' – Why?
Yesterday the WSJ and the NYT had pieces on the changed atmosphere between Trump and the Saudis. But just like us they found no clue of what is really going on behind the scene. A head-fake?
Dec 9 – Syria – ISIS Is Defeated – The U.S. Is Next In Line
The Iranian General Soleimani is warning the U.S. military to leave Syria. He predicts that it can not hold the ground. The Kurds are slowly moving back into the Syrian-Russian-Iranian camp. The neocons at the British Henry Jackson Society are already up in arms about this and foresee the end of the U.S. occupation. How do they feel about being in the same camp as Soleimani?
Please use the comments as open thread …
A couple points for 6 @ Petra on opium in Afghanistan, starting with the payments made to the Taliban in 2000-2001 in exchange for a ban on poppy cultivation; this was left out of the Rolling Stone story above:
May 17, 2001: US Gives Taliban Millions for Poppy Ban
Secretary of State Powell announces that the US is granting $43 million in aid to the Taliban government, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop occurred in January on orders of the Taliban. . . And in fact, in the same month Powell asks Congress to give Afghanistan $7 million more, to be used for regional energy cooperation and to fight child prostitution. . .This follows $113 million given by the US in 2000 for humanitarian aid.
The context here is that the U.S. under both Clinton and Bush, before 9/11, was pushing for a deal with the Taliban on the TAPI pipeline to bring oil and gas to Pakistan and India. This is extensively discussed in the book Forbidden Truth: US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia & the Failed Search for Bin Laden
The result of three years of investigation by a leading French intelligence expert & investigative journalist, Forbidden Truth is the untold story of the Clinton & Bush attempts to stabilize Afghanistan so that US energy companies could build a pipeline. In particular, it details the secret hazardous diplomacy between the Bush administration & the Taliban from February to August 2001–a story still untold in the US media–talks that ultimately led the US to make threats via Pakistani intermediaries to the Taliban in 7/01 that they were going to bomb Afghanistan if the Taliban didn’t comply.
That book also details Al Qaeda financing out of Saudi Arabia by Khalid bin Mafhouz, which caused the Saudis to fill all kinds of libel suits against the book in Switzerland, France, Britain, etc. Well worth reading.
The conclusion is the U.S. funneled at least $150 million in cash direct to the Taliban from 2000-2001 in a bid to get them onboard with their oil pipeline plan; they were also hoping the Taliban would expel Osama bin Laden or hand him over – who knows where the money ended up. That pipeline was (is) to run right through Helmand Province, poppy central, which is why both GW Bush and Barak Obama tried so hard to ‘pacify’ Helmand, for example the Marine invasion in 2010. Endlessly failed pipedream.
The bottom line on opium, though, is that it’s the only cash crop for the farmers; there’s no market export system, they can grow food for subsistence but any cash for anything, machinery, whatever, opium is it. They can sit on the opium gum for months if necessary until a trader shows up, because it doesn’t spoil in storage. This is all result of the post-1979 destabilization games Brezinski and Carter started in Afghanistan, though both the Soviet Union and Reagan played their roles, before that the country was looking pretty good, on the path to developing. Bastards playing their stupid fucking geopolitical chess games, right? Millions died.
There’s another fact, too, the global pharmaceutical industry could plausibly buy Afghan opium, but it’s cheaper for them to grow their own – they just grind up the whole poppy plant, extract the morphine with solvents, convert it to oxycontin and what not and that’s what feeds the American pharmaceutical opiate addicts. When they lose their prescription, it’s on to black market Mexican and Afghan heroin. Shooting up on the streets of every city, every homeless encampment, there it is.
Drugs, oil, guns, money, slaughter – the American Empire’s stock in trade. The sooner the whole shithouse comes crashing down, the better.
Posted by: nonsense factory | Dec 11 2017 5:35 utc | 46
@71, Don Bacon;
I just meant the Silk Road was now kaput, not that it hadn’t been the driving force behind US policy in the region for decades. It dates all the way back to the mid-1990s, at least, and got started in Pakistan with Benazir Bhutto, with bids for the oil/gas pipeline between Unocal (not then part of Chevron) and the Argentinian company Bridas. Here’s an excerpt from Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, from the beginning:
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden By Steve Coll
“(1997) Tying a pipeline deal into the broader agenda of American foreign policy could provide Unocal with a competitive advantage. Some European or Middle Eastern companies seeking oil and gas deals in Central Asia arranged payoffs to local officials. Apart from Unocal, Niyazov [Turkemenistan president] dealt with an array of American consultants and middlemen, some of them thick with mysterious connections in Turkey and the Middle East. Unocal itself had a mysterious Saudi partner called Delta with little experience in the oil and gas field. If it was not on board to facilitate commissions to middlemen, its role was otherwise difficult to explain. But the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States made it very costly and risky for a large American company like Unocal to become directly involved with payoffs. What Unocal executives could offer instead was the credibility of a security alliance with the United States, grounded in big energy deals. As a salve for Russian pressure, Niyazov had long sought the attention of the U.S. government. By striking a major deal with Unocal he could insure himself against Russian intimidation. For its part the Clinton administration saw the promotion of American oil interests in the newly independent countries of Central Asia as sound foreign and economic policy. Trade between the United States and the newly independent states was soaring—up to $4.6 billion in the first half of 1995, a 35 percent increase over the previous year. Oil and gas interests led the way. In Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. . .
As far as the opium deal, see the Rolling Stone article:
“It’s about 10 pounds, a half-acre’s yield. “If I’m lucky, I might get 60,000 kaldar for this,” he says. That’s about $600.”
At 2000 pounds a ton, thats $120,000 a ton – and the UN says Afghanistan’s total yield is 6,400 tons at most. That’s $768 million at the farmer level. The article claims that the street value of that 10 pounds of opium, once converted to heroin, is $150,000. If true, that would be a total value of $192 billion.
But that’s not how it works; there are probably ten middlemen in between the farmer and London street dealer, each taking their cut. Those ‘street value’ claims are mostly nonsense, it’s sold at much lower wholesale prices and there’s always some lost or intercepted. People always talk like having ten kilos of heroin makes you suddenly rich; but none of them have the slightest idea how to turn it into cash without getting jailed or robbed or murdered. That’s movie thinking.
The Taliban would probably only get a percentage, a kind of tax, on opium smuggled out of the country. So to them, $150 million in cash looks pretty good in 2000, when the harvest was likely a good deal smaller. As far as how the CIA would get its hands on the drug money? They certainly wouldn’t be getting billions, perhaps millions.
Posted by: nonsense factory | Dec 12 2017 4:31 utc | 80
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