Meet Walter Pincus. He has “covered” the U.S. Intelligence Community for over two decades.
Fine Print: U.S. Intelligence and Afghan Narcotics
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Click on the story title to read the story. The entire story is built arouind an Air Force contracting announcement, and everything there-in is taken at face value including the absurd claim electronic processing of Dari information not only allows it to accept locally generated Afghan intelligence but to also return finished intelligence reports in Dari to the Afghan counternarcotics police.
Nothing on Karzai's brother being the top drug lord in Afghanistan.
Nothing on Mussareff being the top heroic processor in Pakistan.
Nothing on opium gonig from 0 to 80% of the total world supply from the day the U.S. invaded to today.
Nothing on the role of CIA funding of the Pakistani intelligence service as being the core enabler of this state of affairs.
In fact, nothing at all in this article useful to the public. This is worse than fluff, this is wasted ink and paper.
Below, for a certain amount of balance, is the opposite of Pincus, also flawed, this time making way too many assumption, but overall illustrating the complete lack of strategic thinking (or the insanely criminal nature of what we do).
U.S. Hidden Agenda: Restore Afghan Drug Trade
by Michel Chossudovsky, 5 April 2004
The one key sentence:
Based on recent figures (2003), drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.” (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
And now to conclude, extracts from our review of GHOST WARS: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll.
The most important point in the book is not one the author intended to make. He inadvertently but most helpfully points to the fact that at no time did the U.S. government, in lacking a policy on Afghanistan across several Administrations, think about the strategic implications of “big money movements.” I refer to Saudi Oil, Afghan Drugs, and CIA Cash.
. . . . . . .
The greatest failure of the CIA comes across throughout early in the book: the CIA missed the radicalization of Islam and its implications for global destabilization. It did so for three reasons: 1) CIA obsession with hard targets to the detriment of global coverage; 2) CIA obsession with technical secrets rather than human overt and covert information; and 3) CIA laziness and political naiveté in relying on foreign liaison, and especially on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Both Admiral Stansfield Turner and Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski come in for criticism here. Turner for gutting the CIA, Brzezinski for telling Pakistan it could go nuclear (page 51) in return for help against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Final Editorial Comment: Coll also works for The Washington Post. The differences between him and Pincus are plapable: Coll does his homework and writes books that are meaningful. The problem with Coll is that he does not publish his book homework in the Post, he just uses his job there for access. Not complaining, just pointing out that the value is in the books, not the Post.
The Washington Post is on its deathbed for two reasons:
1. It never made the leap from being a news hole with local gossip to being a digital public intelligence service able to power up the aggregation of sources and readers at infinite scale and in multiple languages.
2. It is-like most non-profits that peg at the high table, so totally enmeshed with the two-party system and “the establishment” that it has sacrificed its integrity and chosen to go along, get along, and not be the investigative journalism enterprise it could be.
