NATO – Making the World a More Profitable Place for Heroin Producers

We read recently how major British “Too Big to Jail” bank HSBC was fined as a result of knowingly being involved in money laundering on a massive scale for South American and Mexican drug cartels; a crime for which not a single executive has been charged, far less jailed. Today we learn, thanks to NATO protection, that 2013 promises a record crop for Afghanistan’s blooming opium poppy industry.

In fact it is reported that three times as much opium was produced in Afghanistan’s notorious Helmand province last year as when British troops first went there in 2006 and, more startling still, that a United Nations forecast claims that this year’s crop will be even higher.

Whilst British troops, under orders, turn a blind eye to the growing of opium poppies in Helmand, it remains an inevitable consequence that the opium derived from these self same poppies constitute the largest source of the drug on sale on British streets.

Western governments have previously tried to persuade the country’s peasant farmers to grow cotton in place of opium poppies but without much success. The biggest problem being that cotton, at best, barely makes a profit – whilst the financial rewards for opium are relatively enormous.

Ironically one of the reasons given why the West decided to impose itself on the country, apart from “fighting terrorism” and “delivering democracy”, was that of destroying the country’s opium poppy industry. However, far from putting the opium growers and heroin manufacturers out of business NATO chiefs and Western politicians now distance themselves from the problem to the extent that production has more than doubled when compared to the Taliban era.

Many Afghan producers as a result of Western coercion and/or bribes abandoned the traditional opium crop and turned to growing cotton in response – a big mistake as the price of the crop on the global commodities markets has been depressed for some years now, to the extent that growers can barely cover the cost of production. Consequently it is no surprise that they have reverted to the opium cash crop to restore their previous standard of living.

NATO and its bought and paid for puppet regime in Kabul are now unwilling to take action against the growers for both security and personal reasons. They fear, with much justification, that the destruction of growers crops would drive them into the arms of the Taliban. Furthermore, as many Afghan and no few Western politicians and officials are said to benefit directly or indirectly from heroin production there is no real impetus for change.

The sad fact is that the British forces overseeing the security of Afghan producers and their “produce” are unwilling participants in a supply line of death that stretches from the badlands of Helmand to the working class housing estates of Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow and scores of other British towns and cities.