A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State
The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic. / Part XI
Peter Dale Scott - Reportedly Far West was founded in 1998; and Surikov and Saidov were already directors when they attended the Beaulieu meeting in July 1999. I believe that this meeting discussed the Russian presence in Kosovo, and the imminent increase in the flow of Afghan drugs through Kosovo.
That this flow is huge has been attested to by many observers. Russian sources estimate that from 1991 to 2003 the same group shipped to Western Europe up to 300 tons of heroin and sold it to wholesale buyers of Kosovo Albanian nationality. In the same period they sold up to 60 tons of heroin to Azeri and Roma (gypsy) wholesalers in the Volga and the Urals Federal Districts of Russia. The group’s total receipts for heroin in 1991-2003 are estimated to be $5 billion. (1)
The chief narco-baron of the group is said to be Vladimir Filin, the head of Far West. Like Surikov, Filin has been known to share his knowledge of drug-trafficking with the public. (2) And grounds have been alleged to suspect that his contacts with the CIA through drug-trafficking date back to Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The informed Indian observer B. Raman charged in 2002 that
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda, by taking advantage of their local knowledge and contacts. (3)
The narco-barons selected by the CIA, according to Raman, were “Haji Ayub Afridi, the Pakistani narcotics baron, who was a prized operative of the CIA in the 1980s,” Haji Abdul Qadeer, Haji Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali. (4)
Philip Smucker, a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor, has confirmed that in 2001 the drug trafficker Haji Mohammed Zaman (once “at the top of the heroin trade in Jalalabad”) was recruited in Dijon, France for the anti-Taliban cause, by “British and American officials.” (5) And the Asian Times corroborates Raman’s claim that Zaman’s long-time Pakistani drug-trafficking partner, Haji Ayub Afridi, was also released from a Pakistani jail at this time. (6)
If Raman is correct, the CIA not only blessed but directed the 1980s flow of drugs from Afridi, Zaman, and Abdul Qadeer into the hands of Soviet officers like Vladimir Filin and Aleksei Likhvintsev. It would appear that corruption was being used as a political tool to weaken and subvert the Soviet Union.
Although the United States may have used known traffickers like Zaman and Qadir to regain access to Afghanistan, its stated ultimate goal, and the one assumed by the mainstream media, was to reimpose its own kind of order. Whether the country is Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Colombia, or Kosovo, America’s national interest is said to be to install and then protect pipelines. And pipelines require peace and security.
The prime geostrategic interest of the drug traffic in Afghanistan and elsewhere was precisely to prevent peace and security from happening. (7) It is true that the international illicit drug industry, like the international oil industry, is polymorphous and flexible, relying on diversified sources and markets for its products in order to maintain its global dominance. But for the global drug traffic to prosper, there must always be key growing areas where there is ongoing violence, and state order does not prevail.
The Bush Administration’s policies cannot be characterized as reflecting the national goals of peace and security, as outlined above. On the contrary, its shocking underfunding of Afghanistan’s recovery, like its complex and destabilizing interventions in Georgia, suggest that it too, as much as the drug traffic, hopes to utilize instability – as a pretext for maintaining U.S. bases.
America now faces in Afghanistan, what Russia faces in Chechnya, a conflict which is favorable to drug trafficking but increasingly deleterious to orderly reconstruction. (8) Meanwhile elements profiting from the flow of Afghan drugs continue to grow stronger and more dangerous.
Footnotes
1: www.compromat.ru/main/zuganov/surikov2.htm.
2: Alexander Nagorny "Narcobarons from the CIA and MI-6" Pravda-info 2004.09.13
3: B. Raman, “Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No. 489,
4: Raman, “Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul.”
5: Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 9. This decision by British and American officials (the latter almost certainly CIA) may have contributed to bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. Cf. CNN, 12/29/01.
6: "US turns to drug baron to rally support," Asia Times Online, 12/4/01; Peter Dale Scott, “Pre-1990 Drug Networks Being Restored Under New Coalition?”
7: Thus Shamil Basaev, who controls the Abkazian drug traffic, and his lieutenant Khattab, are famous among Russians and Chechens alike as “the incorrigibles” who want only “endless war” (Murphy, Wolves of Islam, 136, 165).
8:The Iraq War is also beneficial to the drug traffic. See the following story from the Balochistan Post, quoting the London Independent: “"BAGHDAD: The city, which had never seen heroin, a deadly addictive drug, until March 2003, is now flooded with narcotics including heroin. According to a report published by London’s The Independent newspaper, the citizens of Baghdad complained that the drugs like heroin and cocaine were being peddled on the streets of the Iraqi metropolis. Some reports suggest that the drug and arms trafficking is patronized by the CIA to finance its covert operations worldwide."
Part I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
Part II: The Meta-Group, West, and East
Part III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
Part IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999
Part V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
Part VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”
Part VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
Part VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking
Part IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
Part X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
Part XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic.
Last Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher.
Peter Dale Scott - Reportedly Far West was founded in 1998; and Surikov and Saidov were already directors when they attended the Beaulieu meeting in July 1999. I believe that this meeting discussed the Russian presence in Kosovo, and the imminent increase in the flow of Afghan drugs through Kosovo. That this flow is huge has been attested to by many observers. Russian sources estimate that from 1991 to 2003 the same group shipped to Western Europe up to 300 tons of heroin and sold it to wholesale buyers of Kosovo Albanian nationality. In the same period they sold up to 60 tons of heroin to Azeri and Roma (gypsy) wholesalers in the Volga and the Urals Federal Districts of Russia. The group’s total receipts for heroin in 1991-2003 are estimated to be $5 billion. (1)
The chief narco-baron of the group is said to be Vladimir Filin, the head of Far West. Like Surikov, Filin has been known to share his knowledge of drug-trafficking with the public. (2) And grounds have been alleged to suspect that his contacts with the CIA through drug-trafficking date back to Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The informed Indian observer B. Raman charged in 2002 that
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda, by taking advantage of their local knowledge and contacts. (3)
The narco-barons selected by the CIA, according to Raman, were “Haji Ayub Afridi, the Pakistani narcotics baron, who was a prized operative of the CIA in the 1980s,” Haji Abdul Qadeer, Haji Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali. (4)
Philip Smucker, a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor, has confirmed that in 2001 the drug trafficker Haji Mohammed Zaman (once “at the top of the heroin trade in Jalalabad”) was recruited in Dijon, France for the anti-Taliban cause, by “British and American officials.” (5) And the Asian Times corroborates Raman’s claim that Zaman’s long-time Pakistani drug-trafficking partner, Haji Ayub Afridi, was also released from a Pakistani jail at this time. (6)
If Raman is correct, the CIA not only blessed but directed the 1980s flow of drugs from Afridi, Zaman, and Abdul Qadeer into the hands of Soviet officers like Vladimir Filin and Aleksei Likhvintsev. It would appear that corruption was being used as a political tool to weaken and subvert the Soviet Union.
Although the United States may have used known traffickers like Zaman and Qadir to regain access to Afghanistan, its stated ultimate goal, and the one assumed by the mainstream media, was to reimpose its own kind of order. Whether the country is Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Colombia, or Kosovo, America’s national interest is said to be to install and then protect pipelines. And pipelines require peace and security.
The prime geostrategic interest of the drug traffic in Afghanistan and elsewhere was precisely to prevent peace and security from happening. (7) It is true that the international illicit drug industry, like the international oil industry, is polymorphous and flexible, relying on diversified sources and markets for its products in order to maintain its global dominance. But for the global drug traffic to prosper, there must always be key growing areas where there is ongoing violence, and state order does not prevail.
The Bush Administration’s policies cannot be characterized as reflecting the national goals of peace and security, as outlined above. On the contrary, its shocking underfunding of Afghanistan’s recovery, like its complex and destabilizing interventions in Georgia, suggest that it too, as much as the drug traffic, hopes to utilize instability – as a pretext for maintaining U.S. bases.
America now faces in Afghanistan, what Russia faces in Chechnya, a conflict which is favorable to drug trafficking but increasingly deleterious to orderly reconstruction. (8) Meanwhile elements profiting from the flow of Afghan drugs continue to grow stronger and more dangerous.
Footnotes1: www.compromat.ru/main/zuganov/surikov2.htm.
2: Alexander Nagorny "Narcobarons from the CIA and MI-6" Pravda-info 2004.09.13
3: B. Raman, “Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No. 489,
4: Raman, “Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul.”
5: Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 9. This decision by British and American officials (the latter almost certainly CIA) may have contributed to bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. Cf. CNN, 12/29/01.
6: "US turns to drug baron to rally support," Asia Times Online, 12/4/01; Peter Dale Scott, “Pre-1990 Drug Networks Being Restored Under New Coalition?”
7: Thus Shamil Basaev, who controls the Abkazian drug traffic, and his lieutenant Khattab, are famous among Russians and Chechens alike as “the incorrigibles” who want only “endless war” (Murphy, Wolves of Islam, 136, 165).
8:The Iraq War is also beneficial to the drug traffic. See the following story from the Balochistan Post, quoting the London Independent: “"BAGHDAD: The city, which had never seen heroin, a deadly addictive drug, until March 2003, is now flooded with narcotics including heroin. According to a report published by London’s The Independent newspaper, the citizens of Baghdad complained that the drugs like heroin and cocaine were being peddled on the streets of the Iraqi metropolis. Some reports suggest that the drug and arms trafficking is patronized by the CIA to finance its covert operations worldwide."
Part I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug TrafficPart II: The Meta-Group, West, and EastPart III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan KhashoggiPart IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999Part V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source YasenevPart VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”Part VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev VersionsPart VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug TraffickingPart IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.Part X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil BushPart XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic. Last Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics. Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. sfux - 8. Sep, 10:51 Article 7649x read
