Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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Good article, but I'd like to add something about how the opium cultivation really started
[Read the article: Most Dems no better than Bush on Pakistan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The same pattern applies to U.S. efforts to stem the narcotics trade in Afghanistan; the Bush administration did not begin to develop even a superficially coherent counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan until 2005 -- too late to break the critical financial link between the opium trade and the resurgent Taliban.
Speaking of Afghanistan and drugs -- there's an interesting background story here that has never really been told in one place by one person. I pieced it together from declassified State department documents I found on the Internet, Raja Anwar's account of the financing behind Daoud's coup, and books on hashish written by hippies who traveled to Afghanistan in the late sixties and early seventies.
Afghanistan has one of the world's oldest cannabis cultures. According to tribal legend, a Sufi holy man called Baba Ku imparted the secret of making hashish to ten Afghan tribes, in order that they be able to cure the plague.
Okay someone might be shouting, "Shut up you pothead -- what does that have to do with national security?"
Hippies and Richard Nixon and the founding of the DEA. That's the link.
One might argue that the Afghan monarchy was doomed to fall.
But I will argue that Richard Nixon decided that it ought to fall, because he thought of King Zahir Shah as a weakling. A known hashish smoker, and even rumored to be the Afghan version of "gay."
When the King's traitorous uncle Mohamed Daoud sent an emissary to the American embassy in Kabul asking for American support for his planned authoritarian coup, he was officially refused by the State Department, who said they couldn't meddle in internal affairs.
However, according to Raja Anwar, Kissinger's buddy the Shah of Iran just happened to promise Daoud a huge whopping load of money to help him pull it all off.
The King was magically hustled out of the country just in time for the coup, on the amazing pretext that he needed to be flown to Italy for urgent treatment of a black eye he got during a volleyball game at his compound.
Why would Nixon do anything to help Daoud, when Daoud had close ties to the Soviet Union and was surrounded by a cabal of young Afghan Marxists who believed their leader was a committed Marxist?
Nixon loved strong men, he said so on the same tapes where he confessed that he wouldn't shake hands with anyone in Northern California because they're all queer.
Daoud was just the kind of man Nixon loved. And it turned out Daoud was more like Franco than Castro. His strident Pushtun nationalism trumped any pretenses to socialism he made to please and tempt his young Marxist followers.
Daoud and Nixon shared the same contempt for anyone who used cannabis.
The National War on Weed was just kicking into gear, and Afghanistan was a big supplier of hashish to America.
Prior to 1973, there was no opium growing in Afghanistan, but cannabis grew everywhere.
In 1973, the DEA was founded, and they opened an office in Kabul. Right around the time Daoud took over.
Daoud was willing to do what the King wasn't willing to do -- kick all the hippies out of the country and launch a wholesale attack on Afghanistan's native hashish culture.
Within a year or two after Daoud took over, cannabis only grew in places where Daoud's soldiers couldn't find it.
And that's when you first start seeing opium being grown in the south of Afghanistan, and tribal people using the proceeds to finance a resistance against the Marxists in Kabul.
That's how opium began to finance Afghanistan's tragic war against itself.
When could we have broken the link between opium and the Taliban?
Bush wasn't four years too late. He was 32 years too late to intervene in the chain of bad decisions that brought about the situation that plagues us today.
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I could never deal with this, sorry
[Read the article: Our new friend is a racist -- should we dump him?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I know people aren't perfect but when I grew up, almost everyone was racist and my nickname ended up being "n-word-lover" because I wouldn't play along.
There was one black kid in our school. He made like five close white friends and everyone else chased him around the playground and called him "n-word" and beat him up.
If you refused to join in and beat him up, you got called an "n-word-lover" and you got beat up too.
Racism is child abuse. There's no way I'm ever going to be tolerant and accepting towards someone I know is a racist.
It's like tolerating a child molester. They destroy the souls of children. That's not something I will ever be able to tolerate.
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Where is Hunter Thompson when we need him?
[Read the article: Hillary and the mean kids on the bus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can only imagine how the Doctor would savage this band of spoiled, petulant sissies who hold such enormous power over the common folk and wield it like the drunken, whorish assholes they are.
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Oh nooooo now I feel so guilty!
[Read the article: Go away, can't you see I'm writing?!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Instead of writing a reply, I'm going to get back to the chapter I'm supposed to have finished by now.