Good news, everyone! We've got a new strategy for dealing with that narco-state formerly known as Afghanistan.



U.S. President Donald Trump’s South Asia strategy will focus on fighting the lucrative opium trade that is currently providing more than half of the Taliban’s estimated $400 million in annual funding, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told lawmakers, echoing other American officials.

“We’re going to look at where does it [opium trade] help[s] the Taliban and fight it from that direction, rather than going pretty much in a big way just after the farmers themselves,” Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing Tuesday.

I'm sold.

We can't tell a Taliban fighter from a thug working for a warlord, but we'll be able to determine which opium lab is owned by the Taliban and which is owned by a local government official.



But here in one of the few corners of Helmand Province that is peaceful and in firm government control, the green stalks and swollen bulbs of opium were growing thick and high within eyeshot of official buildings during the past poppy season — signs of a local narco-state administered directly by government officials.

In the district of Garmsir, poppy cultivation not only is tolerated, but is a source of money that the local government depends on. Officials have imposed a tax on farmers practically identical to the one the Taliban use in places they control.



This new strategy, combined with a troop surge, will involve providing security for Afghani farmers, which happen to grow opium.

Perhaps more troubling is the fact that Trump has now announced that more U.S. troops will be sent to effectively guard the world’s largest opium crop, less than a month after Trump declared the domestic opioid crisis a “national emergency.”

It's not all bad news. Some people are going to make a ton of cash, and they happen to work in the Afghan government.



Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

Hmmm. The CIA and opium?

What could those two things possibly have to do with each other?

The CDC reported back in 2015 that “heroin use in the United States increased 63% from 2002 through 2013.”

Meanwhile, the CIA was running a country that increased its opium production 20 times over during that exact same timeframe, becoming the source for 90% of the planet's opium.

Coincidence? Maybe not.



The CIA is also overjoyed because its black-ops budget - which is tied to the exponential growth of opium production in Afghanistan - is now secured possibly for another 20-50 years, claims Mike Raddie, co-editor of online site BSNews.

Believe it or not, there are rumors that the CIA is directly involved with smuggling opium from Afghanistan to the U.S.

I know! Crazy, huh?

Where is Gary Webb when you need him?