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Guardian
...he was not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm's way for a government that does not stand up against corruption...
Wiki
The 1,680 kilometres (1,040 mi) pipeline will run from the Dauletabad gas field to Afghanistan. From there TAPI will be constructed alongside the highway running from Herat to Kandahar, and then via Quettaand Multan in Pakistan. The final destination of the pipeline will be the Indian town of Fazilka, near the border between Pakistan and India.[3]
Within Asia, there's something called the "Golden Crescent", an area of illicit opium production. Afghanistan's major export is opium
Russia has become the biggest consumer of Afghan heroin with 21% of all the drug consumed in the world, as of the latest UN Office on Drugs and Crime report “Addiction, Crime and Insurgency” published on October 21.
According to the report, no less than 70 tons of heroin were trafficked to Russia in 2008 – that’s three times more than to the US and Canada together, and much more than previously estimated.
“It's being brought to Russia across the unprotected, transparent, and I would call them virtual borders, which were established after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Viktor Ivanov, head of the Federal Drug Control Service.
At present, opium poppies are mostly grown in Afghanistan, and in Southeast Asia, especially in the region known as the Golden Triangle straddling Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Yunnan province in the People's Republic of China.
The majority of the heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico and Colgmbia. Up until 2004, Pakistan was considered one of the biggest opium-growing countries.
Afghanistan’s opium production is used to fund insurgencies against invading U.S. forces. The money from Afghan opium trickles through everyone in the country — from farmers to police to government officials. Outside the country, Afghan opium production is a $65-billion industry.
Afghanistan is now responsible for 92 percent of the world’s opium supply.
Most of this supply is distributed throughout Pakistan, Russia, Europe and China. Russia has been hit hard with heroin use, as deaths resulting from AIDS have exploded from 1,900 people in 2001 to 40,000 in 2007, 80 percent of which resulted from dirty needles.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan strongly influences Russia’s rising heroin statistics. After the U.S. went into Afghanistan, the Taliban needed more weapons and money, facilitating increased opium production. Russian gangsters trade military weapons with Taliban drug lords for heroin, fueling the vicious cycle with the U.S. military.
Russia is the world's top consumer of Afghan heroin. Last month President Dmitry Medvedev warned that high drug use amongst the country's youth was a threat to national security.
Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, said AIDS still carried heavy stigma in Russia and the government needed to address this.
"Something in society is malfunctioning and it is unable to talk aloud about weaknesses," he said.
2009-08-25
Police in the southeastern Chinese border town of Zhuhai have recently seized 11.5 kilograms of heroin and arrested five suspected drug traffickers, Xinhua News Agency reports.
It is reportedly the biggest drug case in China in three years. Besides the large amount of heroin, police also confiscated other drugs, raw materials, a pistol and 97 bullets.
Sunday, August 9, 1987
Chinese criminals have taken over the dominant role in New York City's heroin industry, in a sudden restructuring of a multibillion-dollar enterprise that for decades was the preserve of the Mafia, Federal law-enforcement officials say.
Authorities say ethnic Chinese traffickers have recently been flooding the New York market with huge shipments of Southeast Asian heroin, or China White, which is among the world's purest.
The Caspian Sea and gas fields in Turkmenistan, that's where. There is now a sense of urgency to extract these reserves as peak oil has now been reached. Experts estimate the Caspian could hold "possible reserves" of up to 233 billion barrels of oil. By comparison, Saudi Arabia has 261 billion barrels of oil and the United States 23 billion!
* According to the American Petroleum Institute (API), federal lands, including those on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), hold an estimated 116 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 650 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas — enough to fuel over 65 million cars for 60 years and meet the natural gas needs of 60 million households for 160 years.
* However, there could be much more oil and natural gas than has been estimated in areas where industry has not been permitted to explore, and where new technologies allow enhanced recovery of energy resources while protecting the environment.
Coal is one of the true measures of the energy strength of the United States. One quarter of the world’s coal reserves are found within the United States, and the energy content of the nation’s coal resources exceeds that of all the world’s known recoverable oil. Coal is also the workhorse of the nation’s electric power industry, supplying more than half the electricity consumed by Americans.
Look at the map; notice the deaths of military in and around the proposed pipeline, especially Helmand Province. The TAPI pipeline will begin construction in 2010, hence the urgent surge in troop requirements to secure the route.
Afghanistan is now responsible for 92 percent of the world’s opium supply.
According to the American Petroleum Institute (API), federal lands, including those on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), hold an estimated 116 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 650 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas — enough to fuel over 65 million cars for 60 years and meet the natural gas needs of 60 million households for 160 years.
But there are actually more casualties to the North East
Originally posted by dodadoom
Silly me, I thought it was all about the opium!
Seriously, I'm humbled. I had heard of this but....
you earned the star and flag for this thread!
! You also made my friends list!
Recent days have seen a spate of news articles about the brother of the country's American puppet President, Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother, is reported to have been on the CIA payroll for much of the past eight years, and to also be simultaneously implicated in the country's illegal opium traffic, against which the USA military forces are ostensibly fighting, as well as having ties to the Taliban, and helping the CIA to operate a paramilitary force, and on and on the tangled story goes. (1) All of which obviously raises a very large question as to what the CIA and the Pentagon are really doing in Afghanistan. Connect the dots and you could come to the reasonable conclusion that the American war in Afghanistan has two main functions: 1) to promote the opium trade for the CIA's own clandestine, black budget purposes, and 2) to promote general mayhem and warfare for the purpose of creating such instability and confusion that the war cannot possibly be won or successfully prosecuted, and, thus, just grinds on and on generating continuing, multi-billion dollar profits for American corporate war profiteers.
Now, I am an American by birth and I am a long-term, informed observer of the scene in the USA. None of these insane asylum antics are occurring in a historical, social, economic, or political vacuum. Much of this we have seen before, but with each round of new crimes the audacity and brazenness of the usual suspects increases. It is astonishing to admit it, but the scale of the corruption has exceeded all rational bounds over the last decade, and in recent weeks and months, has become even more outlandish than ever before, if such a thing is possible. The vicious Caesars of ancient Rome, in all of their diabolical lust for absolute power and their grandiose schemes of global domination were but rank amateurs compared to the maniacal political pawns and minions that today prance and preen on the world stage, all the while plotting the totalitarian subjugation of billions of people and the outright theft of trillions of dollars worth of financial and natural resources. Millions of people all over the world can sense, or outright see, that we are fast approaching a sort of rupture with the past, and are about to be flung headlong over the brink of a yawning chasm into God-only-knows-what-awaits-us, and they also can sense, or see, that the aforementioned prancing and preening pawns and minions have something to do with the unsettling events of these parlous times.