DRUG-FINANCED SALAFI JIHADISM - The Afghan Drug Trade, A Threat to Russia and US Relations

[Jan Klimkowski]

A typically fine article by PDS.

my mind, almost my conscience, is heavy when I think of the recent revelations that Rumsfeld and Cheney, immediately after 9/11, responded with an agenda to remove several governments friendly to Russia, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.[1] (Ten years earlier the neocon Richard Perle told Gen. Wesley Clark in the Pentagon that America had a window of opportunity to remove exactly these Russian clients, in the period of Russian restructuring after the breakup of the USSR.)

What we have seen, even under Obama, looks very much like a progressive implementation of this agenda, even if we acknowledge that in Libya and now Syria Obama has shown much greater reluctance to put large numbers of US boots on the ground. (Small numbers of US Special Forces were reportedly active in both countries, stirring up resistance to first Qaddafi and now Assad.)

What particularly concerns me is the relative absence of public response in America to a long-term Pentagon-CIA agenda of aggressive military expansion of dominationism, if you will.

(snip)


If I were to return to Russia I would again, as a former diplomat and as a Canadian, call for US-Russian collaboration to deal with the world's pressing problems. But for a week I have been wondering whether I have not perhaps been blinding myself to the realities of America's intransigent strive towards dominance.[2] Here in London I have just met with an old friend from my diplomatic days, a senior UK diplomat and Russian expert. I was hoping that he would dissuade me from my negative assessment of US and NATO intentions, but if anything he increased them.

(snip)


I believe that the most urgent task today to preserve the peace of the world is to curb America's drive towards dominationism, and to re-energize the UN"s prohibition of unilateral and preemptive wars, for the sake of coexistence in a peaceful and multilateral world.

However, I'm afraid my response is that the Professor's proposed UN solution is unlikely to succeed.

Some of the conferees I spoke to see Russia has having been threatened for two decades after World War Two by active US and UK plans for a nuclear first strike against Russia, before it could gain nuclear parity. While obviously these plans were never implemented, those I spoke to were sure that the ultras who desired them have never abandoned their desire to humiliate Russia and reduce it to a third-rate power. I cannot refute this concern: my recent book American War Machine also sees a relentless push since World War Two to establish and sustain global American dominance in the world.

Thus the conference speakers were bitterly opposed to Putin's endorsement, as recently as April 11 of this year, of NATO's military efforts in Afghanistan. They are particularly incensed by Putin's agreement this year to the establishment of a NATO base in Ulianovsk, two hundred kilometers east of Moscow in Russia itself. Although the base has been sold to the Russian public as a way to facilitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan, one speaker assured the conference that the Ulianovsk outpost is described in NATO documents as a military base. And they resent Russia's support of the US-inspired UN sanctions against Iran; they see Iran instead as a natural ally of Russia against American efforts to achieve global domination.

So what is Putin up to here?

This feels like an act of deep political cooperation, amongst the same high level entities who collaborated to create conflict after conflict, drugs route after drugs route, Dirty Business Opportunity after Dirty Business Opportunity, throughout the Cold War and its equally fatuous successor, the so-called "War on Terror".

PDS's analysis of the drugs trade and the role of Big Oil and its covert forces and cutouts is entirely correct below:

Significantly, the hawks have used the drug eradication strategies of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) as well.[30] As I wrote in Drugs, Oil, and War (p. 89),

The true purpose of most of these campaigns ... has not been the hopeless ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA.[31]

This has been conspicuously true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. recruited former drug traffickers to join in its 2001 invasion.[32] Later the U.S. announced a drug reduction strategy that was explicitly limited to attacking those drug traffickers supporting the insurgents.[33]

Thus those concerned (as I am) with reducing Afghan drug flows are faced with a dilemma. Effective strategies against international drug trafficking must be multilateral, and in Central Asia they will require increased U.S.-Russian cooperation. On the other hand the energies of the principal pro-U.S. forces currently on the ground there notably the CIA, U.S. armed forces, NATO, and the DEA have in the past been intent primarily not on cooperation but on U.S. hegemony.

There are recurring allegations that US oil companies, either directly or through cutouts, engage in covert operations; in Colombia (as we shall see) a US security firm working for Occidental Petroleum took part in a Colombian army military operation "that mistakenly killed 18 civilians."

More relevant to Russia was a 2002 covert operation in Azerbaijan, a classic exercise in deep politics. There former CIA operatives, employed by a dubious oil firm (MEGA Oil), "engaged in military training, passed brown bags filled with cash' to members of the government, and set up an airline...which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan."[14] These mercenaries, eventually said to number 2000, were initially used to combat Russian-backed Armenian forces in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh; but they also backed Muslim fighters in Chechnya and Dagestan. They also contributed to the establishment of Baku as a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to both the Russian urban market and also the Chechen mafia.[15]

In 1993 they also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan's elected first president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by Heidar Aliyev, who then agreed to a major oil contract with BP, including what eventually became the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey. Note that the U.S. background of the MEGA Oil operatives is unmistakable. However who financed MEGA is unclear; and may have been the oil majors, many of which have or have had their own covert services.[16] There are allegations that major oil corporations, including Exxon and Mobil as well as BP, were "behind the coup d'état" replacing Elchibey with Aliyev.[17]

It is clear that Washington and the oil majors have a common perception that their survival depends on maintaining their present dominance of international oil markets. In the 1990s, when it was widely believed that the world's largest unproven reserves of hydrocarbons lay in the Caspian basin of Central Asia, this region became the central focus for both corporate U.S. petroinvestment and also for U.S. security expansion.[18]

Much as I try, I'm afraid I have little hope that the nefarious operations of these forces can be defeated by organs such as the UN.

However, other than opposition to, and exposure of, these agendas I cannot propose any solution.