Since the U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the production of opium in the country has increased by 40 times according to Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, or FSKN, fueling organized crime and widespread death.

The head of the FSKN, Viktor Ivanov, explained the staggering trend at a March U.N. conference on drugs in Afghanistan. Opium growth in Afghanistan increased 18 percent from 131, 000 hectares to 154, 000, according to Ivanov’s estimates.

“Afghan heroin has killed more than one million people worldwide since the ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began and over a trillion dollars has been invested into transnational organized crime from drug sales,” said Ivanov according to Counter Current News.

A dramatic drop in U.S.-funded opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan over the last few years is fueling a growing heroin addiction problem afflicting tens of thousands of women and some children in the war-ravaged country, reports the Washington Post (WaPo).

The Pentagon unnecessarily spent big on Afghan army uniforms that are the wrong color because the guy in charge of making the choice “liked what he saw.”

Last week President Trump delegated to Secretary of Defense James Mattis the authority to determine how many more troops to deploy into Afghanistan. Mattis has reportedly settled on 4,000. He claims that this will help end the stalemate in that war. He is wrong. This deployment will have no impact on the outcome of the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan, but more importantly, continues a troubling trend in U.S. foreign policy: The military move has no ties to a strategic outcome.

The United States has a pattern of pushing for regime change in sovereign nations, while ignoring the consequences. One major result from the list of countries the U.S. has invaded this century is that they make up the top of the “least peaceful” nations in the 2017 Global Peace Index.

The 2017 Global Peace Index is another reminder that the United States’ seemingly endless pattern of pushing for regime change in sovereign nations that have done nothing to the U.S. has indeed resulted in a significant amount of blowback—most of which will be misrepresented, if not ignored by the mainstream media.

Americans may stay on Afghan soil for a “long-haul” mission that could evolve into several decades of “generational struggle,” General David Petraeus, ex-commander of US troops in Afghanistan, admitted.
The current war in Afghanistan is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, David Petraeus, who led the US military campaign there back in the 2000s, told PBS News Hour.

Though the retired General argued that “we went there for a reason and we stayed for a reason,” to defeat Al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks, he hinted that “a generational struggle” may unfold in the war-ravaged country.

“This is not something that is going to be won in a few years. We’re not going to take a hill, plant a flag, go home to a victory parade,” he said. “And we need to be there for the long haul, but in a way, that is, again, sustainable,” he added.

To back his remarkable statement, he cited other examples of US deployments in other parts of the world that have lasted decades.

The US is definitely going to be sending more ground troops to Afghanistan soon, but the exact number is yet to be determined, with the Pentagon today backing away from media reports yesterday that they’d settled on a figure of 4,000 more troops, saying no final decisions have been made yet on numbers.

That might suggest they’re leaning toward an even bigger number, with influential retired Gen. Jack Keane suggesting that the US needed to send up to 20,000 more ground troops if they wanted to win the war, saying he believed the 4,000 figure was not likely to change the direction of the war.

Defense Secretary James Mattis conceded in testimony to the Senate this week that the US is “not winning” in Afghanistan, and President Trump has since given him unilateral authority to decide on troop levels and strategy. Mattis was seen as leaning toward the high end of escalation proposals.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is reportedly set to announce an increase of about 4,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Most of the US boots on the ground will train or advise Afghan forces, but some will battle both a resurgent Taliban and Islamic State.

The U.S. has a problem with the former Marine General Mattis as Secretary of Defense. Mattis thinks tactics, not strategy.

It makes little sense to send additional troops when one does not what strategy they will have to serve. There is so far no other way to end the war in Afghanistan other than to simply pull out of it. The racket that the war has become can only be stopped by such a grand strategic decision. Sending troops before deciding on the strategy practically guarantees that the choice of a pull-out will be excluded from the evaluated possibilities. The tactical decision of sending more troops will drive the strategy.

Yesterday the Secretary of Defense Mattis was asked during a Congress hearing what "winning" in Afghanistan would mean:

The idea, [Mattis] said, would be to drive down the violence to a level that could be managed by Afghan government forces with the help of American and allied troops in training their Afghan counterparts, providing intelligence and delivering what Mr. Mattis called “high-end capability,” an apparent allusion to air power and possibly Special Operations forces.
The result, he said, would be an “era of frequent skirmishing,” but not a situation in which the Afghan government no longer faced a mortal threat.
Winning in Afghanistan is an "era of frequent skirmishes" in which the proxy government is continuously endangered? That does, of course, not make any sense. It is a holding strategy that will only work as long as the general framework stays the same. Should the Taliban change their strategy or a new actor come in the "holding" strategy will be finished.

Defense Secretary James Mattis was grilled before the Senate yesterday, with Sen. McCain expressing his frustration that there is no new strategy yet to "win" in Afghanistan. Mattis promised a new approach by July, but the real question is that after the 2009 surge of 100,000 US troops, what kind of victory might be achieved by yet another surge, this time of perhaps 5-6,000? In today's Liberty Report we point out that victory is not possible because Washington doesn't even have a clear view of what it might look like. How many more billions of dollars wasted? How many thousands more lives lost?

For quite some time, professor Iman Soleh and I discussed the link between the ‘old guard’ Southeast Asian (mainly Indonesians and Malaysians) jihadi cadres, so-called ‘Afghan alumni’, and the vanguard, a ‘new wave’, that which is now trying to destabilize, even destroy both Syria and the Philippines.

While the name ‘jihad’ itself has been used habitually and ‘liberally’ all over the Western mainstream media, it was clear to all of us at the table that behind the brutal combat as well as most of the horrors unleashed in such places like Syria and Philippines, hidden are the geopolitical interests of the West in general and of the United States in particular.

Professor Soleh has explained the latest ‘dynamics’:

Defense Minister, General of the Army, Sergei Shoigu, speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministers - members of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Kazakhstan, spoke of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and expressed the view that the international coalition in the country has not brought any tranquility.

He noted that the Islamic State operates in Afghanistan - a state which has observer status in the SCO.

"Of particular concern is the strengthening of Afghan militants positions, the number of which reaches around 3.5 thousand. Establishing an Islamic caliphate threatens the security of all; Afghanistan and neighboring countries."

In this regard, Shoigu said Russia will strengthen its military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with the latest weapons, as well as assisting the armed forces of Central Asian states in their defense measures.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that President Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster will soon be proposing yet another troop increase in Afghanistan. According to the Times, “The White House shelved the deliberations over Afghanistan three weeks ago, after an initial Pentagon proposal to deploy up to 5,000 additional American troops ran into fierce resistance” from White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and other advisers.

But McMaster, reports the Times, is “undeterred” and “plans to bring the debate back to the front burner this coming week,” according to an anonymous U.S. official.

Displaying what one commentator called “sheer 19th century bloodlust and thirst for empire,” Erik Prince, founder of the private mercenary firm Blackwater, argued in The Wall Street Journal this week that the United States should deploy an “East India Company approach” in Afghanistan.

The country, he wrote, should be run by “an American viceroy who would lead all U.S. government and coalition efforts - including command, budget, policy, promotion, and contracting - and report directly to the president.”

Prince continued:

In Afghanistan, the viceroy approach would reduce rampant fraud by focusing spending on initiatives that further the central strategy, rather than handing cash to every outstretched hand from a U.S. system bereft of institutional memory.

During the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected as the president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the “just war” in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops stationed in Iraq.

More to the point, however, when President Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, at the same time, he pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the purportedly “just war” in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan jumped from 30,000 during the Bush Administration to more than 100,000 during the supposedly “pacifist” Obama Administration.

A huge suicide bomb ripped through a secure area of Kabul at the height of the Wednesday morning rush hour, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 300, Afghan officials said.

The blast, which came a few days into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, was one of the deadliest to hit the Afghan capital in recent years.

A policeman killed six other police servicemen in Afghanistan's southern province of Zabul and joined Taliban movement (terrorist organization, banned in Russia), local media reported Sunday citing local officials.

As the Trump administration contemplates sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a bipartisan group in Congress has demanded a floor debate on the war's endgame and whether it remains in America's interest to remain engaged there militarily.

After months of top US generals insinuating, and sometimes flat out alleging, that Russia is “arming the Taliban,” the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has finally stepped forward and admitted to the Senate that there “is no physical evidence” to back up such a claim.

Since Russia has been on bad terms with the Taliban for decades, the allegations never made any sense, but began being pushed by US officials with NATO ties roughly around that Russia offered to help broker peace talks, apparently based wholly on them having invited the Taliban to the talks.

The DIA’s comments appear to support this being the reason, saying they had “some indications” Russia had offered something to he Taliban, but that there was no evidence it ever amounted to anything, let alone weapons or money.

Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly wasn't informed about plans to use 'the mother of all bombs' on April 13 in eastern Afghanistan

The 21,600-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb is the largest non-nuclear ordnance in the US arsenal

US forces dropped the bomb on suspected ISIS tunnels in Afghanistan, resulting in 96 dead militants, according to the Afghan government

Decision to use the weapon was made by General John Nicholson, the most senior Army commander in Afghanistan

Even the waves of so-called “terrorists attacks” in Germany, Holland and France last year underscores that these are the conspiracy theories aimed at continuous war in Syria and elsewhere. Many Europeans would still keep faith with the war-mongers’ cooked-up stories and back the US and NATO’s intervention in Syria. The sole purpose of all these planned attacks was and is to demonize the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda and draw a whole support to wage a filthy war against “the nations” where these terrorists operate.

Unrest in Afghanistan is a recipe for more US weapons’ sales to war-exposed countries, viable drug trafficking that generates a profit far beyond measure, unearthing of underground resources worth of several trillion dollars, restraining of the regional military and economic rival powers and so others.

The United States is pouring money into a corrupt sewer. The World Justice Project’s 2016 Rule of Law Index ranked Afghanistan 111 of 113 countries assessed. Despite U.S. arms, aid and training, its divided and demoralized security forces can’t stand up to the Taliban.

We are asking our military to build a nation on the other side of the world, dispatching soldiers who don’t know the language, the culture, the religion, the ethnic and sectarian divisions or the history. The one thing that may unify Afghanistan’s tribes is their pride in their independence. Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires.” Its people routed the British forces repeatedly from 1839 to 1919 when Britain ruled the world. Its mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union’s invasion in the 1980s. The United States, with the most powerful military in the world, may avoid defeat for as long as it wants to waste lives and resources, but it will not win.

While publicly US strategy in the Afghan War has been based around the conceit that the conflict is in a “stalemate,” despite mounting losses by the Afghan government. Advisers have offered a classified assessment on the conflict recently, however, conceding that the Ghani government’s survival is at risk, and that the war is being “slowly” lost.

Their solution, as with everyone else, is even bigger escalation, with reports from those familiar with the plan saying that the US needs “more than 50,000” ground troops in Afghanistan to ensure Ghani’s survival, with an eye toward eventually defeating the Taliban.

That’s a big escalation, and a much bigger one than has been suggested in previous reports, which initially presented the proposed escalation as 3,000 to 5,000, and most recently made it a choice between 3,000 or keeping troop levels flat. The Pentagon is evasive about troop levels in recent months, but around 8,400 troops are believed to presently be in Afghanistan.

By the end of this month, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor HR McMaster will deliver to President Trump their plans for military escalations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. President Trump would be wise to rip the plans up and send his national security team back to the drawing board – or replace them.

The two top national security officials in the Trump administration – Secretary of Defense James Mattis and national security adviser HR McMaster – are trying to secure long-term US ground and air combat roles in the three long-running wars in the greater Middle East – Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Proposals for each of the three countries are still being developed, and there is no consensus, even between Mattis and McMaster, on the details of the plans. They will be submitted to Trump separately, with the plan for Afghanistan coming sometime before a NATO summit in Brussels on 25 May.

But if this power play succeeds in one or more of the three, it could guarantee the extension of permanent US ground combat in the greater Middle East for many years to come – and would represent a culmination of the “generational war” first announced by the George W Bush administration.

Ex-George W. Bush-era national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects behind the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has admitted that bringing democracy to the Middle Eastern country was not the real priority. Speaking to Sputnik, Norwegian political scientist Georg Jakobsen said that the US's real goal was to impose its own model on Iraq.

Speaking at a meeting at the Brookings Institution, a leading DC think tank, on Thursday, Rice revealed that "security," not democracy, was the real motivating factor behind the US invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Iraq's case, the former national security advisor (who also later served as Bush's secretary of state) revealed that the US "didn't go to Iraq to bring democracy to Iraq. We went to Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, who we thought was reconstituting weapons of mass destruction, and who we knew had been a threat in the region. It was a security problem."

Advisers to US President Donald Trump have worked out and proposed a new plan that could significantly change the situation in Afghanistan expanding the military activities against militants, local media reported.

The Washington Post reported Monday that a group of Trump's military and foreign policy advisers had proposed a strategy aiming to push the Taliban terrorist movement, outlawed in Russia, to the negotiating table with the Afghan government.

According to the news outlet, the plan implies strengthening of the Pentagon's role in anti-Taliban struggle as it could be allowed to make decisions on the issues related to the number of troops in the country, as well as their presence at the battlefield and to attack the terrorists not only with the use of drones.

The program could result in reverse of the steps of ex-US President Barack Obama reducing the country's presence in Afghanistan along with the costs of the operation, the newspaper added.

The situation at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is always tense, particularly after Friday’s exchange of fire between the two sides, but appears to be rapidly spiraling out of control, as Pakistani forces have attacked and destroyed several checkpoints along the Chaman border, which connects Balochistan to Kandahar.

At least 50 Afghan soldiers are reported dead, and over 100 wounded, as Pakistan reports they’ve destroyed five separate checkpoints in “retaliation” for Afghan fire. There was no news of new Pakistan casualties since Friday’s exchange of fire.

Locals say that the border crossing was closed earlier in the day by Pakistani security officials, and has remained so, with loudspeakers ordering all villages on the Pakistani side of the border evacuated until further notice. Helicopter gunships are reported overhead, and over 2,000 families have been displaced.

The latest in a series of Pentagon proposals on changing US policy in its assorted wars, a series of options are expected to be delivered to President Trump next week on Afghanistan. The options being presented, according to the Pentagon, are meant to “break the stalemate” in Afghanistan.

By “stalemate,” what the Pentagon really means is mounting losses, which have left the Taliban with more territory now than at any other point in the 16-year US occupation. The Pentagon has previously indicated the most ambitious escalation will involve some 5,000 more US troops and 13,000 NATO troops being deployed.

But either way, wars don’t get deescalated by the US these days, so all of the plans being offered are escalations, with the least of the deployments being 3,000 US troops and everything just going up from there. The details beyond that are not all public knowledge.

News this week that 300 Marines have returned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan recalls the failed surge of 2009-10, when roughly 20,000 Marines beat back the Taliban in the region, only to see those “fragile” gains quickly turn to “reversible” ones (to cite the infamous terms of General David Petraeus, architect of that surge).

While fragility and reversibility characterize American progress, the Taliban continues to make real progress. According to today’s report at FP: Foreign Policy, “the Taliban controls or contests about 40 percent of the districts in the country, 16 years after the U.S. war there began.” Meanwhile, in January and February more than 800 Afghan troops were killed fighting the Taliban, notes Foreign Policy, citing a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. That’s a high figure given that fighting abates during the winter.

Matthew Hoh, a military veteran and diplomat who resigned his State Department post in protest of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, says the 16-year Afghan war won't end until the U.S. drops its strategy of sporadic escalation and insistence on Taliban surrender, with Afghan civilians suffering the worst consequences.

NATO is considering sending additional military personnel to Afghanistan and increasing the timeframe of the deployment in the view of the “challenging security situation,” the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, told the German Die Welt daily.

The additional troops are expected to join the NATO Resolute Support mission which it says is aimed at training, assisting and advising Afghan security forces in their fight against violent insurgents and various extremist groups.

The ‘training’ mission, after the majority of ‘combat’ troops were withdrawn, currently involves 13,000 servicemen, with around 8,400 of them being from the US.

The April 13 strike by US forces in eastern Afghanistan saw the first deployment of the MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, in a combat situation, dropped against ISIS forces in tunnels. The 22,000 lb pound was much vaunted for its huge size, the biggest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, and presented as a “message” to other nations.

The reality, not so much. Locals report that the MOAB did way less damage than you’d think, noting that there were green trees still standing 100 meters from the center of the blast, with no sign of damage, and that the tunnels the ISIS fighters were within appear all but untouched.

The latest UN report on civilian deaths in Afghanistan showed a dramatic 54% increase in the number of women killed in the first quarter of 2017 over the same period in the previous year, alongside a 17% rise in the number of children killed. The deaths cover “conflict-related” fatalities.

Women and children are both are growing amount of the overall casualties of the Afghan War, and the UN expressed particular concern about the lack of effort to ensure protection for civilians among the various combatants, given that “fighting season” is fast approaching.

With little infrastructure,, Afghanistan’s war tends to quiet down somewhat during the winter, with a lot of areas of the country impassable. This tends to lead to a “spring offensive” which marks the official start of fighting season after the thaw, with casualties rising significantly nationwide.

Since the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, torture has been an ongoing problem, with both the occupation forces, and in particular the allied Afghan security forces, routinely abusing detainees captured in “conflict-related” circumstances.

The UN has issued a new report warning that the problem of torture among security forces is “as widespread as ever,” noting that at least 39 percent of detainees interviewed by the UN gave credible testimony of having been tortured by Afghan police, troops, or intelligence officials.

This is up from 35% reporting torture during the last UN report, in 2015. They also noted that despite repeated assurances by the Afghan government that torture won’t be tolerated, there is a near total lack of accountability for those torturing detainees in the country.

The Afghan War is going extremely poorly, 16 years in, and the US military needs someone to blame for its failures. The first choice among a lot of top military figures seems to be Russia, and while they offer no evidence to back up their claims, several have alleged that Russia might conceivably be arming the Taliban.

US commandeer Gen. John Nicholson appeared to be joining that camp today during comments in Kabul, complaining about the “malign influence” of Russia in the country, and insisting that he was “not refuting” allegations of Russia shipping weapons to the Taliban.

“Not refuting” is a very weak version of alleging, in this case, as US officials have offered no evidence that this is the case, nor any plausible reason why Russia would conceivably do this, as Russia fought materially the same insurgency during the 1970s and 1980s.

2001 was the official year U.S. forces began to invade Afghanistan with hostile force following the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush told Americans it was to defeat the Taliban and those terrorists who were threatening the United States. However, sixteen years later, the truth begins to emerge on what is at stake in Afghanistan and what there is to gain… dope, minerals, and power.

Afghanistan provides 90% of the world’s Opium, the raw material needed for the production of Heroin. It is basically the only way Afghanistan can keep their economy going. Without the Poppy fields, Afghanistan is finished.

An estimated 300 U.S. Marines are heading to a Taliban stronghold in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand, one of the deadliest regions of the ongoing war for coalition forces located along the Pakistan border, reports Marine Corps Times.

The American troops are expected to reach their destination — where the Taliban has largely reversed previous U.S./NATO coalition gains — by the end of this month. Nearly all of Helmand has once again fallen under the control of the Taliban. Helmand sits next to Kandahar province, widely known as the birthplace of the Taliban.

Last week, the US deployed the MOAB “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan for the first time ever, dropping it in a remote part of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, supposedly against ISIS tunnels. Today, Pentagon officials confirmed that US ground troops are near the site of the bombing, still fighting ISIS forces.

The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever deployed by the US, but what it actually accomplished is unclear, as the Pentagon has not confirmed any death tolls, and is keeping the site off-limits. That there are still ISIS fighters there to fight against, however, suggests that the MOAB was far from decisive.

Afghan security forces are still blocking access to the site in the eastern province of Nangarhar, where the US military dropped last week the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat.

While the current Afghan government tries to defend the US use of the MOAB “Mother of All Bombs” last week against the Nangarhar Province, former President Hamid Karzai was extremely critical of the action, calling it an “immense atrocity” against fellow human beings.

Karzai complained that the current government was not offering enough comment when the US commits large strikes, saying the use of the largest non-nuclear bomb in history amounted both to a violation of Afghan sovereignty, and inherent disrespect to Afghanistan’s soil and environment.

The MOAB strike was dropped in the Achin District of Nangarhar, above what the US claimed was a substantial tunnel network used by ISIS. Though there is no sign of damage done to the tunnels, and MOAB is not intended to be a penetration bomb, President Trump has heralded it as a “successful event.”

During a visit to South Korea, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence admitted Monday that the recent bombings of Syria and Afghanistan were a warning to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

US president Donald Trump sounded sincere when he described how he felt after seeing pictures of "beautiful little babies" allegedly killed by a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on April 4.

“These heinous actions by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated," said Trump, and hours later, the US launched nearly 60 tomahawk missiles in response to the allegations.

But what about the beautiful little babies killed by US bombs since Trump became president? Is Trump not concerned about those children because they were killed by his missiles, and not Assad’s chemical weapons?

In the first three months of his presidency, Trump has dropped bombs – and killed children – in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

Earlier this week, President Trump ordered the dropping of a Massive Ordinance Air Blast (MOAB) on an Islamic State hideout in Afghanistan. The "Mother of All Bombs" allegedly killed at least 100 Islamic State jihadists. However, Wikileaks points out the cave complex that the bomb was dropped on was built by the CIA.

Washington failed to attend the latest international conference hosted by Moscow, where 11 nations discussed ways of bringing peace to Afghanistan. The US branded it a “unilateral Russian attempt to assert influence in the region.”

Despite US President Donald Trump hailed the first drop of "the Mother of all Bombs" in Afghanistan as "another success" of the American armed forces, military analysts doubt that the event will affect the course of the long-standing conflict in the country.

Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai has blasted the US for dropping its largest non-nuclear bomb in the Asian country, saying Washington is using his country as a “testing ground” for its new weapons.

Vijay Prashad and Paul Jay ask if the US "mother of all bombs" dropped on Afghanistan and the missile attack on a Syrian airbase, are PR events to show Trump and the US military will "fight without restraint" and "take on Russia"

The U.S. generals demand, as they always do, more troops to "break the stalemate". But there is no stalemate. The Afghan farmers are winning. The Taliban control more areas now than they ever controlled since 2002.

Dropping 22,000 lbs of high explosives on some shack will not change that trend.

(Though it will drown the news that the U.S. military just bombed and killed 18 of its Kurdish proxy forces in Syria.)

The Pentagon is not fighting to win the war in Afghanistan, but not to have the perception the US lost the war, said Brian Becker from the ANSWER Coalition. Any troop surge in Afghanistan will not be decisive, he added.

Russia was outraged by US top military commander's remarks on Moscow alleged support of Taliban terrorist organization (outlawed in Russia) and expressed its indignation during recent NATO-Russia Council (NRC) meeting, Russian envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko said Friday.

The US operation against the Taliban and al-Qaeda was supported by all countries. It’s another matter that after receiving the international approval, the United States and its NATO allies, which took over in Afghanistan, started acting rather inconsistently, to put it mildly. During their operation in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat has not been rooted out, while the drug threat has increased many times over. The drug industry prospered. There is factual evidence that some of the NATO contingents in Afghanistan turned a blind eye to the illegal drug trafficking, even if they were not directly involved in these criminal schemes.

In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?

The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.

The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.

Gen. Nicholson now says he wants another 5,000 US and NATO troops, saying he believes the US needs that many to “break the stalemate” in the war. Nicholson has repeatedly labeled the conflict a “stalemate” in recent weeks, which appears to be an overestimation of the situation, with the Taliban continuing to gain ground against Afghan security forces.

The US has repeatedly run into this problem in Afghanistan, with the government’s forces unable to stand up to the Taliban by themselves, and NATO growing weary of continuing to prop them up. This has led to escalations and deescalation for years, constantly trying to save the Afghan government from outright defeat.

Nicholson argued that because 9/11 involved Afghanistan, a loss in the country would embolden terrorists globally.

The staff of American USSR has learned in a book by Dr. Mohammad Daud Miraki and reported with a graphic video of deformed babies at Press TV that The United States' use of radioactive munitions in Afghanistan has destroyed the people's health and mutilated the genetic future of the country, Press TV reports.
Dr. Mohammad Daud Miraki, the author of Afghanistan After Democracy: The Untold Story Through Photographic Images, told Press TV's Kabul correspondent on Monday that the US has committed horrific crimes against the people of Afghanistan.

He said the US used depleted uranium in the country and Afghan babies were being born with severe deformities.

Exposure to depleted uranium causes genetic damage, birth defects, cancer, diabetes, immune system damage, and other serious health problems.

In a press briefing at the Pentagon today, African Command leader Gen. Thomas Waldhauser announced that the US intends to keep ground troops in Libya for the foreseeable future to support “friendly forces,” and to “degrade” the ISIS forces that remain in the country.

Waldhauser did not specify how many US troops are in Libya now, or how many will stay, but did estimate that there were less than 200 ISIS fighters left in Libya. The US had announced the end of the anti-ISIS campaign in Libya back in December, but never fully withdrew from the country.

The US forces were in Libya trying to help the “unity” government defeat ISIS in the city of Sirte. US officials repeatedly claimed the city was totally surrounded, and that no ISIS fighters would get away, though when the fighting finally ended, a substantial number of ISIS fighters did in fact get away.

In the past few months, US officials have increasingly found it convenient to blame Russia for anything that goes wrong, no matter how little credibility such an accusation has. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, US Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, may have gone the farthest, however, saying that it was conceivable that Russia was providing unspecified “supply” to the Afghan Taliban.

Gen. Scaparrotti told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had “seen the influence of Russia of late,” and that “perhaps” this included supplies, though he neither offered any details on what sort of supplies he was accusing Russia of “perhaps” giving the Taliban, nor any evidence that anything he said was true.

Now the question is why heroin use has dramatically increased since 2002? Maybe the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 after the September 11th attacks under the Bush regime had something to do with it? The main-stream media (MSM) establishment mouthpiece The Washington Post admitted in 2006 that heroin production in Afghanistan “broke all records” while under U.S. occupation:

Opium production in Afghanistan, which provides more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin, broke all records in 2006, reaching a historic high despite ongoing U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts, the Bush administration reported yesterday.

In addition to a 26 percent production increase over past year — for a total of 5,644 metric tons — the amount of land under cultivation in opium poppies grew by 61 percent. Cultivation in the two main production provinces, Helmand in the southwest and Oruzgan in central Afghanistan, was up by 132 percent

Afghanistan hardly got a look in during the election campaign. The decade-and-a-half-long war was mentioned only once in the three presidential debates — in the form of a passing reference by Hillary Clinton. Trump, however, might want to put down the golf clubs and start paying attention to the forgotten struggle against the Taliban, which was supposed to have formally ended in December 2014. His generals, backed by GOP hawks in Congress, want to drag it out for a few more years. Their unspoken mantra? When in doubt, double down.

Despite over 15 years of support, the government in Kabul currently controls only 63% of the country. It is likely to lose control of more territory with serious advances by Taliban forces in the last year [PDF]. The government has been rife with corruption primarily related to stealing U.S. development funds and facilitating heroin smuggling. Afghanistan remains the world capital for opium production, and is even hitting new highs.

None of these problems are new. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s own brother was allegedly one of the biggest heroin dealers in the country. And the Taliban have never really been under threat of being outright defeated, so much as temporarily setback.

Large-scale corruption persists, with Afghanistan third from the bottom in international rankings, ahead of only Somalia and North Korea. Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan; yet to have any hope of surviving, the Afghan government will for the foreseeable future remain almost completely dependent on outside support.

And things are getting worse. Although the United States has invested $70 billion in rebuilding Afghan security forces, only 63 percent of the country’s districts are under government control, with significant territory lost to the Taliban over the past year. Though the United States has spent $8.5 billion to battle narcotics in Afghanistan, opium production there has reached an all-time high.

For this, over the past 15 years, nearly 2,400 American soldiers have died, and 20,000 more have been wounded.

We are now moving rapidly into stage II of Levantine Madness as the US boosts its intervention in the war-torn Mideast.

Five thousand US troops are back in Iraq to bolster the shattered nation’s puppet regime that is propped up by American bayonets. New Iraqi military formations have been formed, totally equipped with modern US M1 Abrams tanks, Humvees, and fleets of trucks. More US forces are on the way.

As if this witch’s brew was not sufficiently toxic, US and Russian aircraft and Special Forces are brushing up against one another in Syria. At the same time, the US Navy in the nearby Persian Gulf is provoking the Iranians to please President Donald Trump who seems determined to have war with Iran.

The US Navy is now threatening to impose a naval blockade on war-torn Yemen, another joint US-Saudi warfare enterprise that has gone terribly wrong.

This is while the US was supposed to have completed its pullout from Afghanistan by now, though this was repeatedly pushed back during the Obama administration’s waning years, and ultimately halted. All indications from Pentagon figures since are that they envision troop levels growing from this point – for a never-ending war and occupation. It’s a humiliating attempt to save a dying empire in a region increasingly hostile to its colonial policies and plans:

The US-led invasion was a catastrophe from day one. US airstrikes have killed many civilians already - though the Pentagon denies that. The new surge seems to be aiming for these sorts of targets again - as the CENTCOM claims “the Taliban are all hiding in these areas.”

The head of US Central Command believes more troops need to be deployed to Afghanistan to break the stalemate between the government and the Taliban.

Army General Joseph Votel told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday that 'additional resources' will be required to carry out a new US strategy.

There is mounting evidence that Chinese ground troops are operating inside Afghanistan, conducting joint counter-terror patrols with Afghan forces along a 50-mile stretch of their shared border and fueling speculation that Beijing is preparing to play a significantly greater role in the country's security once the U.S. and NATO leave.

The full scope of China's involvement remains unclear, and the Pentagon is unwilling to discuss it. “We know that they are there, that they are present,” a Pentagon spokesman said. Yet beyond a subtle acknowledgement, U.S. military officials in Washington and in Kabul would not respond to several detailed questions submitted by Military Times.

This dynamic stands in stark contrast to the two sides' feisty rhetoric over their ongoing dispute in the South China Sea, and to Washington's vocal condemnation of Russian and Iranian activity in Afghanistan. One explanation may be that this quiet arrangement is mutually beneficial.

The Obama administration bought Mi-17s for the Afghan air force where they played a vital role in providing ground support in combat operations and in carrying supplies. However, in 2014 the US government imposed economic sanctions on Russia.

"The Ukraine crisis impacted Afghanistan in a major way," Qayoumi stated on Friday. "After the Ukraine crisis we could not use US funds to acquire any spare parts and that caused a major crisis in air power for Afghanistan."

If you had asked Americans about Afghanistan before 1979, it’s a reasonable bet that most of us wouldn’t have known much about that country or even been able to locate it on a map. Perhaps only to the “freaks” of that era, in search of a superb hashish high, would its name have rung a special bell.