Article: Guns, Drugs, and Oil: The Realpolitik of the Afghan War, Part 1

GUNS, DRUGS, AND OIL: THE REALPOLITIK OF THE AFGHAN WAR

by Ed Rippy 12/30/01

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- attributed to Ambrose Bierce

At this writing President Bush is saying that US troops will be in Afghanistan for "quite a long period of time."¹ Hundreds of fighters and top leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, including Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, are still unaccounted for.² Multinational companies are lining up to cash in on Caspian oil and gas reserves when the dust settles.³ And once again the poppy seeds lie in the Earth, waiting for spring to burst into flower -- and then, to bleed opium.⁴

It's no secret that the huge pools of petroleum under the Central Asian Republics -- especially Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all bordering Afghanistan on the North -- are one of the biggest economic prizes on the planet. It's also well known that a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a seaport in Pakistan would favor Western oil interests.⁵ Less well appreciated is the military importance of oil: it's a fact of military life that control of a region's oil confers an important military advantage in that region.⁶ Afghanistan's northern neighbors are the key to controlling all of Eurasia, according to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who wrote in a 1997 book, "The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role."⁷ Less appreciated still is the power of illegal drugs to fuel covert wars and prop up national banks.⁸ Whoever controls central Asia controls not only oil but opium -- and a leading contractor to both the oil industry and the military with close ties to the Bush administration has experience in smuggling drugs and guns.

Bush says he wants to get bin Laden "dead or alive" for the Sept. 11th attacks, but evidence suggests that most of all he wants to silence him. The military tribunals Bush is trying to set up may serve to keep him out of open courts if he should be captured alive.⁹ Elements of the US government, including at least the CIA and the State Department, have been shielding Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda until at least the middle of last year, blocking FBI investigations¹⁰ and refusing to tell Congress their policy with regard to Afghanistan.¹¹ Both the Saudi fugitive and his network, as well as the Taliban, were very useful to the US and its allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in building military training camps around the world and managing opium production in Afghanistan.¹² The three countries had collaborated in setting up the Taliban, bin Laden, and Al-Qaeda, and in seeing that the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left.¹³ A retired Indian spy wrote, "The CIA has. . . experts. . . [who] were closely involved in the production of terrorists and narcotics barons [in Pakistan]. These experts and the State Department officials are worried over the possibility of the CIA's role in the promotion of the narcotics trade in the 1980s coming to light. . . ."¹⁴

The lure of having a military force in the Caspian region, with its immense petroleum reserves (until recently!) under mainly Russian influence, has made war in the region an attractive idea to US military leaders for years. Further, military presence will enable the US government to control the drug trade directly -- and drug money is as vital to economic warfare as oil is to conventional warfare. The amount of money organized crime pumps through the international banking system is greater than the Gross National Products of most countries, and about (an estimated) half of this is drug money.¹⁵ Banks which launder this money charge a fee for their silence; this money can go into the bank's other investments. This makes it "high octane" money -- any financial institution which can attract extra business and take a bigger cut from that business for its special services has an edge in all financial markets. And if the money is laundered through publicly traded stocks and the market played knowingly, the returns can increase by a factor of 20 or more -- so the worlds' stock exchanges are, in their way, as addicted to illegal drugs as are the junkies who curl up in the doorways of our inner cities.¹⁶ In the words of a former Wall St. banker and economic consultant to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, "Those with the lowest cost of capital win. If you don't play with drug money you can't play at all."¹⁷

Halliburton KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), a sprawling multinational run by Dick Cheney until he became Vice President, is a world leader in both oil-related and military equipment and services. It's also been implicated in a CIA-managed guns-for-drugs racket in the 1970s and runs military supply lines which reach into many of the world's hotbeds of drug trafficking. In fact, Brown and Root repaired and upgraded production equipment for a Siberian oil field which was then bought by a Russian consortium which had earlier been caught smuggling heroin.¹⁸ Generally, the CIA and State Dept. don't tell their real plans and often obstruct investigations by Congress, the FBI, and the DEA. The Secretary of State and the Director of [the] Central Intelligence [Agency] (DCI) sit on the National Security Council (NSC) while the FBI and Congress don't, so we shall lay this plot at the door of the NSC (the NSC ran the Contra war, for example, with its attendant drug racket).

Part 2

References:

1. "US Forces Facing Long Afghan Stay, President Asserts." NY Times, 12/29/01.
2. "'New' US War: Commandos, Airstrikes, and Allies on the Ground." NY Times, 12/29/01.
3. "US companies to invest in Pak oil, gas sectors." The Frontier Post, 10/10/01
4. "Opium farmers rejoice at defeat of the Taliban." UK Independent, 11/21/01.
5. Rashid, Ahmed. "Taliban." Yale University Press, 2001.
6. Yergin, Daniel. "The Prize." Simon and Schuster, 1991.
7. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "The Grand Chessboard." New York: Basic Books.
8. McCoy, Alfred W. "The Politics of Heroin." Laurence Hill books, 1991; Raman, B. "Pakistan's Noriegas."
South Asia Analysis Group 11/4/01.
9. "Rules on Tribunal Require Unanimity on Death Penalty." NY Times, 12/28/01.
10. "Has someone been sitting on the FBI?" BBC newsnight, 11/6/01; "Bush veut empecher Ben Laden de parler."
Le Matin, 11/18/01.
11. House Committee on International Relations, hearing 7/12/00.
12. Ruppert, Michael C. "Osama bin Laden's Bush Family Connections." From The Wilderness 9/18/01.
13. See note 10.
14. Raman. B. "US & Pak Terrorism: In perspective." South Asia Analysis Group, 1/20/01.
15. Ruppert, Michael C. "Statement of Michael Ruppert for the International Finance Congress at the Bor
Presidential Hotel and Retreat Moscow," 3/7/01.
16. Fitts, Catherine Austin. "Narco-Dollars for Dummies" Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
17. Fitts, Catherine Austin, in Ruppert, Michael C. "The Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money Pipeline"
18. Ruppert, Michael C. "The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire." From The Wilderness 10/24/01.