And we warned that such action would only destabilize the region further. Just as the US' intervention in Afghanistan throughout the 80s – and its total abandonment of the country it used as its battlefield in its proxy war against the Soviet Union; a war that devastated the nation, killed a million of its inhabitants, and made refugees out of three million more – resulted in the "blowback" terrorism of the 90s and of 9/11, so too would yet another major war in Afghanistan sow the seeds of misery and death and hatred that could only end in more "blowback" in the future.
Afghanistan, for instance, is the world's leading producer of opium poppies. Most of the world's heroin is now manufactured from poppies grown in Afghanistan. The drug trade in Afghanistan initially grew and flourished during the Soviet-Afghan war. If not actually participating in the trade itself (for which there is precedent), the CIA at the very least turned a blind eye while its main assets profited from drug trafficking and used the proceeds to help fight the war against the Soviet occupation. Afghanistan became the world's leading producer of opium during this period.
Then the Taliban succeeded in nearly eradicating the crop in 2001. But with their overthrow, many – including warlord allies of the U.S. – began profiting once more from the trade. It wasn't long after the ousting of the Taliban that experts began warning that Afghanistan was becoming a narco-terrorist state. Opium production grew to surpass all previous records. And while there has been some success, mostly in just the past year, in eradicating the crop from government-controlled provinces, production has increased in areas now under control of the resurging Taliban.
Moreover, members of al Qaeda and the Taliban, most likely including Osama bin Laden – who, needless to say, was never caught – fled into Pakistan, where they reestablished themselves. The chickens had gone home to roost. The war on Afghanistan has led directly to the increasing destabilization of neighboring nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Fortunately, there is some hope that the principles of democracy might prevail in Pakistan, where the prevailing public mind is more moderate and who view the militants and terrorists as a plague upon their land – a plague that was allowed not only a place to sustain itself, but to grow and expand under the government of Pervez Musharraf.
After 9/11, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf pledged to assist the U.S. in its "war on terrorism." This was an absurdity. Pakistan had been up to that very day the principle benefactor of the Taliban, and arguably continued to be long after. Pakistan's shadowy intelligence agency, the ISI – sometimes referred to as a state within a state – has long been accused of links to terrorists and acts of terrorism.
In fact, according to reports in the international media (it only received one brief mention in the U.S., outside of the alternative media, in a blog on the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal website) – including Pakistan's Dawn, the Times of India, Agence-France Presse, the London Times, and the Guardian – it was the head of the ISI himself, Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, who was responsible for authorizing the transfer by Omar Sayeed Sheikh of $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.
According to the reports, the FBI had worked in tandem with India's intelligence services to track where the 9/11 "money trail" led to – until it ended up leading to the ISI chief himself. Then suddenly the story of the money trail – up until then big news – quietly disappeared from the headlines. Mahmud Ahmed was even more quietly removed and replaced just as the story broke.
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