97. Nick Mills, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), 79.
98. New York Times, October 27, 2009.
99. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 333.
100. Shaun McCanna, “It’s Easy for Soldiers to Score Heroin in Afghanistan,” Salon, August 1, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/07/afghan_heroin. Cf. Megan Carpentier, “Is The Military Ignoring the Heroin Problem in the Ranks?” AirAmerica.com, October 20, 2009, http://airamerica.com/politics/10-20-2009/
military-ignoring-its-heroin-problem/?p=all; Gerald Posner, “The Taliban’s Heroin Ploy,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and
-stories/2009-10-19/the-heroin-bomb/full.
101. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 171, cf. 103.
102. General Mahmut Gareev, “Afghan Drug Trafficking Brings US $50 Billion a Year,” RussiaToday, August 20, 2009, http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-20/afghanistan-us-drug-trafficking.html.
103. Jeremy R. Hammond, “Pakistan: General Hamid Gul on Destabilizing Pakistan,” Foreign Policy Journal, August 27, 2009, http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56790.shtml.
104. “Occupiers Involved in Drug Trade: Afghan Minister,” PressTV, November 1, 2009, http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110130§ionid=351020403.
105. See William Blum, “The Anti-Empire Report, No. 6,” January 6, 2010, http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer77.html; Rick Rozoff, “2010: U.S. to Wage War throughout the World,” StopNATO, December 31, 2009, http://rickrozoff.wordpress
.com/2009/12/31/2010-u-s-to-wage-war-throughout-the-world.
Chapter 11: Conclusion
1. This was always true but has been hastened by digital technology. Sandra Braman has described how the welfare states are being progressively displaced by informational states, the latter being defined as states in which governmental bureaucracies “deliberately, explicitly, and consistently control information creation, processing, flows, and use to exercise power” (Sandra Braman, Change of State: Information, Policy and Power [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006], 1, emphasis added).
2. A good survey of what others have called the trend toward “authoritarianism,” “inverted totalitarianism” (Sheldon Wolin), or “soft” or “friendly fascism” (Bertram Gross) can be found in Henry A. Giroux, “Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics beyond Barack Obama,” Truthout, February 15, 2010, http://www.truthout.org/democracy-and-threat-authoritarianism-politics-beyond
-barack-obama56890.
3. For example, an intelligent overview of Afghan history by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould endorses the sane proposal of the Senlis Council, an international think tank, that “would see the conversion of Afghan opium into medicine, with the ultimate beneficiary being the rural Afghan villager” (Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009], 322). But sanity does not guide the formation of narcotics policy, highly positioned traffic protectors do (as David Musto discovered in 1980).
4. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 180.
5. David S. Hilzenrath, “Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling,” Washington Post, July 22, 1987.
6. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 31.
7. U.S. Congress, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair, 100th Cong., 1st Sess., House Report No. 100-433, 630–31. The staff report was published as Appendix E to the minority House Republican report submitted by then-Congressman Dick Cheney.
