True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 419: Afghan Dope
Aired: 2024-11-18
Duration: 01:41:30


=== Liberal Tony Hinchcliffe (04:59) ===

[00:00:00]  So, ladies and gentlemen, Liz has a new character.
[00:00:05]  Why are you?
[00:00:05]  No, Brace wrote these.
[00:00:07]  I didn't write these.
[00:00:08]  Brace wrote these.
[00:00:09]  He literally just shared the note on his from his iCloud account.
[00:00:14]  Yeah, because you wrote on my phone, and so I sent it just as you asked.
[00:00:19]  This is a new character called liberal Tony Hinchcliffe.
[00:00:24]  He needs like a, maybe it should be like, what's like a really like blue-pilled name?
[00:00:30]  I don't know.
[00:00:31]  Like Andy, Andy?
[00:00:38]  Andy Dick.
[00:00:39]  Andy.
[00:00:40]  Andy Hinchcliffe.
[00:00:41]  Andy Hinchcliffe.
[00:00:42]  That doesn't work.
[00:00:42]  Yeah.
[00:00:44]  River, River, River, Riverstone.
[00:00:47]  I don't know what.
[00:00:48]  Let's go.
[00:00:48]  Barack Obama.
[00:00:50]  No.
[00:00:51]  Rivers, River.
[00:00:52]  That's okay.
[00:00:53]  River Stone.
[00:00:54]  River Stone, the Bushwood comedian.
[00:00:56]  Riverstone Edge.
[00:00:58]  Riverstone Edge.
[00:01:00]  Instead of Tony Hinchcliffe.
[00:01:01]  River Stone Edge.
[00:01:03]  I don't know.
[00:01:03]  It's somewhere.
[00:01:04]  We're moving closer to it.
[00:01:05]  I've decided because, you know, there was some question I had in the last episode whether you should be conservative or liberal now.
[00:01:12]  I think I'm going to be liberal now.
[00:01:13]  And so this is, this is, I wrote these on the subway, or I had these given to me by a comedian friend named River Stone Edge.
[00:01:23]  I love that you just completely immediately abandoned the idea that I wrote these.
[00:01:28]  Liz, that's your name.
[00:01:29]  Okay.
[00:01:30]  I'm going to read them.
[00:01:31]  I wasn't surprised so many millennials voted for Trump.
[00:01:35]  They all love orange wine.
[00:01:39]  Very good.
[00:01:40]  Yeah, because he's because the wine is orange, but so is Trump's face.
[00:01:44]  I wrote a couple of variations of that.
[00:01:45]  I was like, maybe it should be they don't like Trump, but whatever.
[00:01:47]  I think it's good.
[00:01:48]  Surprisingly, a lot of millennials are joining the diplomatic services.
[00:01:53]  They heard they would be working with partners and allies.
[00:01:57]  That's pretty good, huh?
[00:01:59]  That's terrible.
[00:02:00]  That's good, though.
[00:02:02]  President Trump said he's going to deport criminals.
[00:02:04]  I guess he'll be moving the White House to Acapulco.
[00:02:09]  Wait, I don't get that one.
[00:02:11]  That one's a little tough.
[00:02:11]  It's sort of a filler joke, but because he's a criminal.
[00:02:14]  How many?
[00:02:15]  34 or whatever?
[00:02:16]  It's many felonies.
[00:02:17]  So he's going to be.
[00:02:18]  Everyone forgot about those.
[00:02:19]  Yeah, I know.
[00:02:20]  Oh, I see.
[00:02:21]  Because he has to deport himself because he's the criminal in chief.
[00:02:24]  Precisely, correct.
[00:02:26]  Why Acapulco?
[00:02:27]  I don't know.
[00:02:27]  I don't know if anyone's like to say it.
[00:02:30]  RFK Jr. has hit back at Trump for his comments about Haitians eating other people's cats.
[00:02:35]  He says there's nothing wrong with eating a pussy that's not your wife.
[00:02:42]  That's terrible.
[00:02:44]  Because you get it, he cheated on his ex-wife so much she killed herself.
[00:02:48]  Matt Gates said he usually skips out on confirmations as the girl's parents don't usually want him there.
[00:02:56]  All right, that was pretty good.
[00:02:57]  That's pretty good.
[00:02:58]  I think there's might be, I think, no, there's, I think, the variation I texted to somebody else, so I think you're good to keep going.
[00:03:03]  The other day, Millennial asked me, why don't we have a liberal Andrew Tate?
[00:03:07]  And I said, well, if you're looking for a charismatic sex trafficker that people say is black, we already have him.
[00:03:13]  Former President Bill Clinton.
[00:03:18]  Oh, man.
[00:03:19]  This is going to kill on Bill Maher.
[00:03:44]  You should start going by Lizboro.
[00:03:46]  If we truly, truly make this switch to being lib.
[00:03:49]  Lizburl?
[00:03:50]  I don't know what this whole thing is about.
[00:03:52]  I'm just like, we got to pick one.
[00:03:53]  We don't have to do anything.
[00:03:55]  I'm liberal or conservative.
[00:03:57]  Why don't you just do whatever you want?
[00:03:58]  Because I want to do one of those.
[00:04:00]  I just can't pick which.
[00:04:02]  I just can't pick which.
[00:04:04]  You can't pick which.
[00:04:05]  I really don't think that you have to pick.
[00:04:08]  We don't.
[00:04:08]  And speaking of witches, hello, my name is Brace Belden, the son of the witches you couldn't burn.
[00:04:14]  What happened to those witches, by the way?
[00:04:16]  The ones that we didn't burn?
[00:04:18]  Yeah.
[00:04:18]  And a bunch of kids.
[00:04:19]  I think that they didn't do so well with the whole hexing of the Trump.
[00:04:24]  I'm just like, if you're one of the witches that we didn't burn, you probably weren't good enough to be such a witch that we would notice you.
[00:04:31]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:32]  Like, you probably.
[00:04:33]  Or were they too good of a witch that we didn't, that they outsmarted us?
[00:04:36]  I think we got the best ones.
[00:04:37]  Because magic has really taken a lot of time.
[00:04:40]  I do think it's true because their kids didn't were not successful at hexing Trump.
[00:04:46]  Exactly.
[00:04:46]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:04:47]  So, like, if you were one of the witches we didn't burn, your magic frankly sucked.
[00:04:51]  We didn't even notice you were doing it.
[00:04:53]  Hello, everyone.
[00:04:54]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:55]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:04:57]  And this is Truanon.

=== Tip Line Episode (07:16) ===

[00:04:59]  Hello.
[00:05:00]  Hello.
[00:05:01]  We have some business to do before we don't do the business.
[00:05:07]  What is it?
[00:05:10]  A couple of things.
[00:05:12]  Matt Gates is in the news.
[00:05:14]  And I want to just call out that we did an episode a long time ago, many moons ago, on him that I believe is still germane because there is, we were literally just talking about this off record with our guests today.
[00:05:33]  But Matt Gates, as people know, is being thrown up as a nominee for Attorney General.
[00:05:42]  Most likely will not see a confirmation hearing and will be appointed in recess.
[00:05:47]  No, like, he'll probably have a Quinciniera hearing.
[00:05:50]  Yeah.
[00:05:52]  A lot of that is to avoid scrutiny from apparently a pretty potentially damning house report and ethics committee looking into some of his activities.
[00:06:03]  But we were just talking.
[00:06:04]  So, one, I want to say there's a link in the show notes.
[00:06:08]  It takes you to our little website where you can find the episode.
[00:06:11]  Check it out because I think it's still funny and it still holds.
[00:06:14]  Episode 149, Ben Gatesy from April 8th.
[00:06:17]  That's pretty good.
[00:06:18]  2021.
[00:06:19]  That was a good one.
[00:06:22]  But also, we say this all the time, but we're actually doing it.
[00:06:26]  We are actually recording a tip line episode.
[00:06:30]  And I want to say this: Bryce just mentioned that he believes that this administration and its approach potentially have the most potential dick pics out there.
[00:06:43]  But I feel like that's more of a metaphor.
[00:06:47]  They have more metaphorical dick pics out there.
[00:06:50]  I think that they have real dick pics out there.
[00:06:53]  I'm saying, even if it's not a dick pic we're talking about, dirt, gossip, anything else in between, you got to hit the tip line because we are actually going to do it.
[00:07:04]  I have not even looked at the last since the last time that we promoted the tip line.
[00:07:09]  Yeah, because we had the show.
[00:07:11]  I know.
[00:07:12]  That's just because that was a scheduling error, scheduling issue.
[00:07:16]  That's our bad.
[00:07:17]  But this time, it's really going to happen.
[00:07:20]  And I do think a lot of people have left a lot of good stuff, but I haven't looked.
[00:07:24]  What if you're doing with the wired?
[00:07:25]  I'm playing with it.
[00:07:26]  You're playing.
[00:07:27]  Stop playing with it.
[00:07:28]  Why?
[00:07:28]  Because you can hear it.
[00:07:30]  It's just, and also, I'm like, I can hear it.
[00:07:33]  I can hear it.
[00:07:34]  You're doing something funny down there.
[00:07:36]  I don't like it.
[00:07:37]  It's just.
[00:07:37]  So I have to.
[00:07:39]  You can definitely hear it less than I can hear when you fucking slam your hand on the I'm sorry.
[00:07:43]  Well, okay.
[00:07:43]  So interesting.
[00:07:44]  You sound like the Harris campaign that men can express themselves in the way that they feel comfortable.
[00:07:53]  And for me, that's exhortations and slamming my open palm down on the table.
[00:07:57]  Tip line.
[00:07:59]  I got to tell you about the tip line thing real quick, Liz.
[00:08:02]  So this episode is coming out the day before we do that.
[00:08:06]  So if you listen to this the day it comes out, which you should because you love our show so much, fucking hit the tip line.
[00:08:11]  Okay, hit the tip line.
[00:08:13]  I know, but I'm just saying, there's not going to be a lot of time to hit the tip line.
[00:08:16]  The number is 646-801-1129.
[00:08:20]  That's 646-801-1129.
[00:08:24]  Call it if you have any dirt.
[00:08:26]  But don't listen.
[00:08:28]  Just don't waste our time.
[00:08:30]  That sounded mean.
[00:08:31]  That did sound mean.
[00:08:32]  But you know what?
[00:08:33]  Waste our time.
[00:08:33]  No, don't waste our time.
[00:08:35]  Why?
[00:08:35]  It's not, I like going through them.
[00:08:37]  I know you do, but we also have their schedule is kind of crazy this week.
[00:08:40]  So I was like, yeah, we don't.
[00:08:42]  It's fine.
[00:08:42]  Waste our time.
[00:08:43]  Let's waste our time.
[00:08:44]  Fine.
[00:08:45]  What else am I going to do with myself?
[00:08:47]  Better myself?
[00:08:49]  Crawl out of the hole.
[00:08:51]  Never mind.
[00:08:53]  Anyways, we have a good episode today.
[00:08:55]  We do.
[00:08:56]  Seth Harp, our old friend, is back on the show to talk about.
[00:09:02]  You forgot already?
[00:09:03]  No.
[00:09:04]  Liz is.
[00:09:05]  I thought you were going to do the whole heroin thing.
[00:09:08]  No, no.
[00:09:08]  When Liz, when I walked in here, Liz was a cigarette in her hand, ashes of like mostly ash, like three inches of ash on it.
[00:09:18]  Chin tucked into like her collarbone, completely knotted out.
[00:09:22]  I walk in here.
[00:09:23]  She goes, oh, hey, what's up, man?
[00:09:26]  I have to like fucking, I have to, do you understand the amount of, I had to use like eight of those naloxone squeezers on her fucking nose to get her to where she is right now.
[00:09:35]  It is crazy.
[00:09:36]  Liz has become addicted to heroin.
[00:09:38]  It's just really, really deteriorating the show.
[00:09:41]  I'm just kidding.
[00:09:42]  We are talking about Afghan dope.
[00:09:44]  Yeah.
[00:09:45]  And a bunch of other stuff, really.
[00:09:47]  So much stuff.
[00:09:47]  We've had Seth on for so many different things.
[00:09:50]  And every time he's great.
[00:09:51]  Yeah.
[00:09:52]  So, let's get to it.
[00:10:09]  Now, a lot has been said about Seth Harp.
[00:10:12]  Troops under his command, but not under his direct command, have sometimes committed what has been called incidents all over the world.
[00:10:22]  Well, with that being said, we'd like to welcome to the show one of our favorite warlords out of the East, coming with a crown made of bones and a body that is obscured with the dust of refined heroin, eyes as dark as the brownest balls of opium that have ever sizzled on the pans of a Chinese man in an alcove in Beijing.
[00:10:47]  Seth Harp, an investigative journalist who has gone deep into the heart of Fort Bragg to smoke methamphetamine with people who have killed probably more peasants than anybody else in history save certain medieval warlords.
[00:11:05]  Seth Harp is an investigative journalist.
[00:11:06]  He has a book coming out in, it is July, called The Fort Bragg Cartel.
[00:11:12]  And welcome to the show.
[00:11:13]  Frequent guest on the damn, not, I don't know, frequent, but semi-frequent guest on the show.
[00:11:18]  Seth, hello.
[00:11:19]  Hello, how are you?
[00:11:21]  Hi, Seth.
[00:11:23]  I'm good.
[00:11:24]  I'm waiting for my challenge coin.
[00:11:26]  We should, we need to make a true non-challenge coin.
[00:11:29]  You absolutely should.
[00:11:30]  You know, in the first year, we did actually send out challenge coins, but I don't think you'd been on the show yet.
[00:11:37]  But they weren't custom.
[00:11:38]  We haven't done a custom challenge coin.
[00:11:40]  We should send a challenge coin to each of our guests.
[00:11:42]  We got to find a, we got to get a mold made.
[00:11:44]  So much to do.
[00:11:45]  Oh, I got plenty of mold in my house.
[00:11:46]  Yeah.
[00:11:48]  Just make sure it says something really like homo erotic, like tip of the spear.
[00:11:52]  Yes.
[00:11:53]  Snake eaters.
[00:11:55]  Snake eaters is good.
[00:11:56]  True and non-rear admiral.
[00:11:58]  It's funny.
[00:11:58]  I always see, it's like you, you kind of see like Western military people making fun of like, cause there's certain, I think like Hezbollah like eats snakes or whatever.
[00:12:07]  They kill snakes and like various armies kind of like in the periphery incorporate snakes into like badass displays.

=== Snake Eaters (02:49) ===

[00:12:16]  People are like, that's stupid.
[00:12:17]  I'm like, that's actually fucking cool.
[00:12:19]  It's, I'm sorry.
[00:12:20]  I don't like snakes.
[00:12:21]  I don't like snakes either.
[00:12:22]  And probably a lot of those guys fight in the snakes and like Hezbollah don't like them either, but they still eat them.
[00:12:26]  Yeah.
[00:12:27]  And they still dominate that dedication.
[00:12:30]  Seth, welcome back.
[00:12:33]  We are here to talk about something very near to my heart, which is heroin.
[00:12:40]  And particularly heroin in Afghanistan.
[00:12:43]  So I was surprised to learn this, but we're not in there anymore.
[00:12:48]  I guess it was like a whole thing.
[00:12:49]  I just must have been not paid attention.
[00:12:51]  I think a lot of people were not paying attention, funny enough, because everyone seems confused that it was kind of an issue in the election.
[00:12:58]  Yes.
[00:12:59]  But I think it was a really big issue, partly because a lot of people lost out on a lot of money, which is what we're maybe going to talk about today, is that so much of our ongoing occupation, installation, frenemy relationship with Afghanistan that ended under the Biden regime was really just, you know, funneling a lot of money to a lot of contractors all over the United States.
[00:13:28]  And that dried up when Biden, you know, exited in the way that he did, which I do think people did, you know, make note of.
[00:13:39]  Yeah, I don't think they'll lose out on too much money.
[00:13:42]  I think they'll just shift those flows to other sites of U.S. intervention, particularly Ukraine, other places, you know, where they're planning things, maybe around China and the Philippines.
[00:13:54]  I mean, they had already washed God knows how many trillions of dollars through Afghanistan.
[00:14:00]  I think it was just, you know, the jig was up because Biden is kind of an unusual figure in the history of the war in Afghanistan.
[00:14:08]  He always, for some reason, he was never about it.
[00:14:11]  I'm not exactly sure why.
[00:14:13]  I just know that a lot of the commanders who served in Afghanistan and top diplomats really didn't like Biden.
[00:14:19]  Famously, Joe, Stanley McChrystal got fired because his aides were talking shit about Biden.
[00:14:24]  There was always just some weird thing about Biden and the war.
[00:14:27]  And I think that contributed a lot to his almost idiosyncratic decision to withdraw, which of course was the only good foreign policy move that he made in the entire duration of his presidency.
[00:14:38]  Yeah, and I had heard he had been friends with Mohammad Zahir Shah back when he was the emir.
[00:14:43]  And Biden had gone to high school with him.
[00:14:46]  So it just he didn't, he didn't really like the way things were going in Afghanistan.
[00:14:50]  Yeah, you know, it was interesting because like there was all this like talk about Trump's going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
[00:14:54]  Trump's going to withdraw from Afghanistan.
[00:14:56]  And it looked like things were drawing down during the Trump.
[00:14:58]  I mean, things did draw down during the Trump presidency.
[00:15:02]  And then there was that sort of spectacular collapse.

=== Climbing the Hill: Afghanistan's Collapse (06:57) ===

[00:15:05]  I mean, really kind of incredible where like cinematic.
[00:15:10]  The Taliban just rolled up the country in like the matter of fucking, I mean, it felt like weeks, you know, obviously much longer process.
[00:15:18]  Simultaneous to the U.S. withdrawal, where it was like, really, I mean, a very, very, and people always say like, you know, last helicopter out of Saigon, last, which, which, by the way, I knew a guy who was on that thing, only half full.
[00:15:31]  Nobody even wanted to leave.
[00:15:33]  But I, it was really like the U.S. was leaving with its tail between its legs in this like hasty withdrawal.
[00:15:39]  And like our last act there was we like, we drone striked a, just a guy in his car with his family, I think.
[00:15:48]  And, you know, that strike was in Kabul and the U.S. did almost no drone strikes in Kabul during the war.
[00:15:53]  They were all out in the countryside.
[00:15:55]  And when they were finally called upon to do one locally, everyone could immediately see what had been the case for years, which is that their intel was shit and they had no idea who they're striking.
[00:16:07]  And every time that they said they killed this and that commander, you know, it was just overconfident monolingual analysts asserting that as a fact.
[00:16:15]  And only because it happened, you know, within a mile of like five New York Times reporters were they able to just go out and say, oh, actually, that was just a bunch of innocent people and like seven children.
[00:16:25]  Yeah, that actually is really analogous to Vietnam too, because it really reminds me of like, well, first of all, I mean, there's so many similarities.
[00:16:32]  And I hate, I'm sorry, I hate being a guy being like, Afghanistan is the Vietnam of whatever, because, you know, obviously we made it into Vietnam for the Soviets, but it was also just our Vietnam too, where we had this like, you know, disaffected, you know, dope fiend army, no disrespect, but I, you know, I can't say I'm too different.
[00:16:51]  Who like the minute we let, well, the South Vietnamese lasted a lot longer than the Afghan National Army, but, you know, just like completely rolled up by a seemingly pretty popular movement and lost.
[00:17:05]  And we had all of this like, one of the, one of the hallmarks of the Vietnam War is basically like commanders saying like, we killed 500, you know, North Vietnamese troops on this hill.
[00:17:18]  They took their bodies or their bodies were incented with Napol.
[00:17:22]  But my guys got these fucking guys.
[00:17:24]  And it seems like, like, you're exactly like you're saying that drone strike really just like, you know, put to bed any, any sort of like bullshit about, you know, no, we had, we had this intelligence.
[00:17:35]  We've been getting these guys.
[00:17:36]  We've been doing these like targeted strikes.
[00:17:38]  Like, no, you're just killing people randomly.
[00:17:40]  And like, then after the fact, claiming that they're such and such terrorists.
[00:17:44]  Yeah.
[00:17:45]  And by that time, the Taliban had completely consolidated a total monopoly on legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people, not necessarily because the Taliban is so great, but because the Afghan national government was completely discredited for specific reasons.
[00:18:05]  One was corruption, which was endemic in the government.
[00:18:09]  The other, which we're going to talk about, was drugs.
[00:18:13]  And then finally, there was a lot of kidnapping and child sexual abuse that took place at the hands of people that were part of the Afghan national government.
[00:18:21]  So between those three things, plus, you know, overly aggressive operations, errant drone strikes, like they had zero popular support.
[00:18:30]  And that's why they just fell apart in the face of the Taliban's advance.
[00:18:35]  Well, let's take a little walk back in history, should we?
[00:18:39]  And talk a little bit about how and why and when we got into Afghanistan and all this kind of started.
[00:18:46]  Not, I mean, this is all well-trodded ground.
[00:18:49]  We've talked about this a lot before.
[00:18:50]  We don't have to get into too much details.
[00:18:52]  But as we're talking about kind of what went down, what's going on in Afghanistan now, we kind of got to go and talk a little bit about what we had been kind of running out of there and why before.
[00:19:05]  Definitely.
[00:19:06]  I mean, Afghanistan was actually one of the only U.S. war zones I've never worked in as a reporter.
[00:19:13]  I've never been there.
[00:19:15]  So I didn't really know too much about the war, I'm sorry to say, until I started writing this book, which isn't about Afghanistan.
[00:19:22]  It's about unsolved murders at Fort Bragg involving special operations soldiers who were trafficking drugs and killing each other.
[00:19:32]  And in sort of reconstructing their military careers for the purposes of telling this narrative, you know, all of them are doing, you know, multiple repeated, more than four, five, six deployments to Afghanistan during certain time periods, especially, you know, in the 2010s.
[00:19:48]  And so in order to understand more what they had been through, I had to research Afghanistan myself and educate myself on the war.
[00:19:58]  And, you know, I can still kind of vaguely recall what my sense had been before that.
[00:20:04]  And I just can't believe looking back on it, it's kind of humbling to think how complacent my understanding of the war was, particularly with respect to the question of drugs, because I can't even remember now, but I guess I had vaguely just always thought that, yeah, you know, poppy grows well in Afghanistan.
[00:20:23]  It's always been kind of a drug-producing country.
[00:20:26]  And the Taliban were involved in it.
[00:20:29]  Probably the Afghan national government was involved in it too.
[00:20:32]  It's just a big mess.
[00:20:34]  And the more I look back into it and researched it and read about it, it dawned on me that that narrative is completely muddled and just wrong.
[00:20:45]  And in fact, heroin production in Afghanistan is something that is very strongly associated with U.S. intervention going back to the 1980s.
[00:20:54]  And it was almost like climbing a mountain, you know, where you are climbing some kind of rocky hill where you see like one peak emerge and then you climb a little bit more and then an even larger peak emerged.
[00:21:06]  Like I really struggle to comprehend the magnitude of what I was learning and how it's possible that for 20 years, like we never really heard about any of this in the media to the point where someone like me, who's not only just someone who reads the news, but also work as a living as a journalist, like that I could be unaware of the reality and the gravity of heroin production in Afghanistan, the truth behind it.
[00:21:32]  Like it's just still something that boggles my mind.
[00:21:37]  But we can start wherever you guys want.
[00:21:39]  I think it's probably best to start in the 1980s.
[00:21:41]  Yeah, I was going to say that that makes sense.
[00:21:43]  Or we could go back to Iskender the Great, that wonderful Macedonian and his dalliances with the pleasure spires of Kublai Khan.
[00:21:55]  But I think the 80s makes the most sense because, well, actually, you know what?
[00:22:00]  I'm sorry.
[00:22:01]  We got to start a little before the 1980s.

=== Drug Traffickers and Warlords (15:25) ===

[00:22:03]  I think we actually should start slightly talking about really something that was perfected during the 1960s and 1970s, which was U.S., I don't want to say complicity.
[00:22:16]  I would say actually, you know, U.S. involvement in the heroin trade and in several different heroin trades, but the French connection and also just like all of these different warlords and I guess you would call them like indigenous fighter groups that were running around Southeast Asia fighting against the communists that were almost entirely supplied in terms of money by both the CIA and some of the Pentagon,
[00:22:43]  but also heroin and famously Air America, you know, shipping out dope and, you know, all those stories of coffins being sent back to the U.S., you know, filled with bags of heroin and, you know, some crazy statistic of like a ton of U.S. soldiers coming back from Vietnam, addicted, physically dependent upon heroin.
[00:23:05]  I think really, I mean, we actually don't have to spend that much more time on that, but it's because I kind of got to go.
[00:23:11]  The founder of Delta Force served in Operation Hotfoot, which was to illegally and secretly train Laotian forces, Hmong irregulars, and also the Laotian Royal Army, who were all, you know, at that time the biggest drug traffickers in the world funded their anti-communist operations by trafficking drugs off of the plain of Jars and other places in Laos to Thailand and Vietnam.
[00:23:36]  The whole South Vietnamese regime was in on it.
[00:23:42]  He later, the commander later, I'm confused in his name.
[00:23:46]  I want to say Jerry Boykin, but that was a later commander.
[00:23:50]  It'll come to Charlie Beckwith.
[00:23:52]  It'll come to me.
[00:23:53]  He came back to the U.S., or he went back to the Vietnam War after that and created several prototype units for Delta Force and then came back and founded the unit in the 80s.
[00:24:08]  They served in Nicaragua with the Contras.
[00:24:10]  I realize you can just string points from one side of U.S. intervention to another, making these connections between individuals.
[00:24:18]  And it's ultimately hard to know what to make of it all, whether there's concerted effort to actually promote drug trafficking, which is what it would seem like on the surface.
[00:24:29]  But eventually I come around to the point of view that it's just that when the U.S. is looking for people to carry out its objectives in war zones and places where it's invaded and places where it wants to overthrow governments, it turns out that the people that are capable and willing of doing that kind of work for money, also there's a lot of overlap between those people and drug traffickers.
[00:24:53]  Because these people are not patriots, you know, because to them, from their perspective, the U.S. is a foreign invader coming into their country.
[00:25:00]  And so who's going to do that type of dirty work?
[00:25:02]  Who's going to do that type of like amoral gunslinging?
[00:25:06]  And not surprisingly, it's drug traffickers.
[00:25:10]  But Myanmar, now that Afghanistan is under Taliban control and they eradicated basically all of the drug production in that country, Myanmar is once again the number one heroin producer in the world.
[00:25:21]  That's right, baby.
[00:25:24]  Back to the source.
[00:25:26]  But famously, the Soviets were asked by the Afghanistan government to come into the country in the late 1970s and were caught in their own kind of quagmire there for quite a while that people, I mean, America very specifically, I mean, we've talked about this a bunch in the show.
[00:25:46]  Like America very, very like specifically tried to make their own a Vietnam for Russia and somewhat successfully.
[00:25:56]  But we used sort of these patchwork of like gangs, sending things that were essentially criminal gangs, tribal groups, you know, political parties in a very vague sense.
[00:26:09]  And in general, just like anybody with a rifle, we sort of tried to make them, or we did make them and supplied them with weapons to fight the Soviets, but they needed money too.
[00:26:20]  And a huge part of that seems to have come from poppy cultivation and heroin dealing.
[00:26:28]  Yeah, the two, so the whole Charlie Wilson's war thing, the covert war against the Soviets, The two biggest recipients of CIA money were Gulbuddin Hekmatar and Nassim Akunzada.
[00:26:42]  And before the 1980s, there actually was relatively little heroin production and opium, specifically poppy cultivation in Afghanistan.
[00:26:53]  It was only after, not so much during the Cobra War itself, but in the 1990s, after the Russians had already been pushed out, the people who had been supported by the CIA became the most powerful warlords in Afghanistan and turned the whole country into anarcho-state by forcing peasants to abandon food crops and start planting poppy instead and then trafficking it internationally,
[00:27:19]  sometimes first processing it as heroin on the border of Pakistan and Iran and Tajikistan.
[00:27:27]  That whole industry really stood up in the 1990s under the misrule of these warlords, who, by the way, don't want to get sidetracked on this too much, but also are very notable for their practice of bacha bazi or child sex trafficking, having cross-dressed little boys that they buy and sell as sex slaves.
[00:27:49]  Another thing that we're told is sort of endemic or just part of the culture in Afghanistan, but in fact is highly associated with people that have served as U.S. proxies over the years.
[00:28:00]  But the Taliban emerged in the 1990s specifically as a reaction to all of the drug trafficking and kidnapping of children.
[00:28:09]  There are reports about Mullah Omar, when he first became a kind of a folk hero and a resistance leader.
[00:28:17]  He led raids to free children that had been kidnapped, and he also carried out assassinations of drug traffickers.
[00:28:23]  So, you know, we hear a lot in the Western press about, you know, the Taliban's suppression of women's freedoms.
[00:28:32]  They're rightly condemned for that.
[00:28:34]  But we never hear about their sort of anti-crime credentials in the eyes of regular Afghan people, which is what to Afghans the Taliban represents.
[00:28:45]  It represents the guys who are going to come in and get rid of not just the drug traffickers and the child rapists, but also the kidnappers, robbers, thieves.
[00:28:52]  And they also are not nearly as corrupt.
[00:28:54]  The Taliban don't operate through a pure system of bribery.
[00:28:57]  So that's what the Taliban represented in the 1990s.
[00:29:00]  That's what it represented all throughout the years of U.S. occupation.
[00:29:04]  And that's what it represents, you know, once again today.
[00:29:07]  Yeah, I mean, to the crime point, it's funny.
[00:29:09]  You know, I've, I've, there was increasing reports from like Western journalists, basically, about the unsafeness of Kabul, like during the final years of the, I mean, during the whole time, but like, especially in the final years of the occupation.
[00:29:23]  And not just like, you know, the Taliban might assassinate you, but like some criminal might just like rob you.
[00:29:30]  And you would hear, like, you know, you'd see these reports of people being like, yeah, like, you know, one of the reasons we miss the Taliban is because you used to be able to like do things openly in the street, like your regular work, and like not be afraid someone's going to steal your car or kidnap you.
[00:29:45]  And kidnappings are like really common in poor parts of the world because like you can kidnap somebody and be like, yeah, $50 and we give them back.
[00:29:54]  It's not some huge movie high stakes thing.
[00:29:57]  It's essentially like an extended mugging almost.
[00:30:01]  And that really seems to have, you know, love them or hate them, disappeared with the Taliban.
[00:30:09]  And people are pretty, you know, Afghanistan is, the people of Afghanistan are not very wealthy.
[00:30:15]  Like there isn't like this, I mean, there's the sort of like Kabul, middle, and upper classes, but like most of the country is, you know, fucking pretty poor.
[00:30:22]  I mean, especially right now, like substance farmers.
[00:30:26]  And, you know, the Taliban enforcing some kind of law, I think makes a huge difference to people, especially, and I want to counterpose that with the American-backed regime that was in Afghanistan.
[00:30:41]  Because if there's one hallmark of that regime, it is lawlessness.
[00:30:44]  And I think that is inextricable from one of their first acts rumored.
[00:30:51]  And Seth very kindly let us read part of his book.
[00:30:56]  You know, I guess the reports vary, but one of the first acts of the U.S.-backed Karzai government was to overturn the poppy ban that the Taliban had implemented.
[00:31:09]  That's right.
[00:31:10]  But take one step back.
[00:31:12]  I'm glad that there was so much heroin production in Afghanistan in the 90s that the availability of heroin greatly increased in Europe and all over the world.
[00:31:24]  And the Taliban implemented a ban and carried out an eradication campaign starting in the year 2000 that ended in 2001, in May 2001, in fact.
[00:31:35]  And inspectors from the UN and the DEA visited Afghanistan in May 2001 and reported that they had, in fact, eradicated virtually all opium cultivation and heroin processing from Afghanistan.
[00:31:52]  That's five months before 9-11 happened.
[00:31:55]  Just five months later, obviously 9-11 and then a month or two after that, the U.S. invaded with a Northern Alliance.
[00:32:03]  Now, who did the U.S. team up?
[00:32:05]  When the CIA went back to Afghanistan after a 10-year hiatus with JSOC and with Delta Force, who did they team up with?
[00:32:12]  Well, in many cases, it was all the same warlords as before, all the same bad actors who had taken refuge in the northern part of the country because there's an ethnic aspect to this.
[00:32:22]  A lot of the drug trafficking class is either Tajik or Uzbek.
[00:32:27]  And a lot of the people that the U.S. works with in Afghanistan are Tajik or Uzbek, whereas the Taliban is Pashtun.
[00:32:35]  And so what we call the Northern Alliance was largely made up of those guys, particularly a guy named Rashid Dostum.
[00:32:42]  He's one of the biggest narcos in Afghanistan.
[00:32:44]  Yeah, and a real fucking scumbag.
[00:32:46]  Yeah, he did the thing with the shipping containers.
[00:32:50]  Wait, can you tell our listeners about that in case they don't know?
[00:32:54]  Rashid Dostum's forces were like transporting a bunch of Taliban prisoners from one place to the other and just basically locked them in a shipping container and let them suffocate.
[00:33:04]  And a lot of people died.
[00:33:06]  Yeah, it's like, I think it was like 200 or something like that.
[00:33:09]  It was really egregious war crime.
[00:33:11]  Yeah.
[00:33:11]  But he's a monster.
[00:33:13]  There's an exhibit at the Airborne and Special Forces Museum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that does nothing but he preys upon Rashid Dostum.
[00:33:22]  There's all these pictures of him and all these exhibits of his exploits.
[00:33:26]  Jesus.
[00:33:27]  And I wonder where he is today.
[00:33:30]  I guess he went over the border to Uzbekistan because for the entirety of the U.S. occupation, he was one of the biggest players in the drug trade and particularly powerful, like I said, on the borders between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
[00:33:45]  He's Uzbek.
[00:33:47]  But so those people, the Northern Alliance, pushed the Taliban out of Kabul.
[00:33:54]  The Taliban kind of fled without a fight, went over the border to Pakistan.
[00:33:59]  And yeah, like you said, Braceley put in a guy named Hamid Karzai, who friend of the pod.
[00:34:06]  I haven't heard from him in a while.
[00:34:08]  CIA I said, longtime CIA asset, was on the payroll of the CIA before the war, during the war, and I don't know whether he is today.
[00:34:17]  I would hope not.
[00:34:19]  Reported or rumored heroin addict, a lot of people say that he himself had a habit that's kind of alluded to in the movie War Machine, where they always show Karzai like laying in bed and unable to get out of bed.
[00:34:33]  He had a reputation for, you know, being apparently dope sick a lot of the time.
[00:34:39]  Wow.
[00:34:39]  In Afghanistan?
[00:34:41]  Get the dope, asshole.
[00:34:42]  Maybe he was trying to get off.
[00:34:44]  Oh, your fucking brother.
[00:34:46]  His brother, Amid Waley Karzai, was one of the biggest, I mean, he controlled Kandahar, which is like controlling El Paso or controlling Reynosa or another major transit point for the drug trade.
[00:34:59]  That was his half-brother, who's also a paid CIA asset, also just like a top narco.
[00:35:07]  His defense minister, Fahid Khan, Hillary Clinton said that he was a drug dealer.
[00:35:12]  She herself used the phrase drug dealer to describe him.
[00:35:15]  There was another important warlord in Jalalabad who was known to be a drug trafficker.
[00:35:21]  A lot of people who are known warlords, slash drug traffickers, who became uh, the Afghan National Government, which was kind of a coalition of warlords based in Kabul but it extended around the country through these alliances.
[00:35:36]  Um and, like you said, there are some diametrically opposed reports about this um, but the best sources and government sources and the most informed reporters say that the new government immediately legalized poppy cultivation.
[00:35:52]  The DEA itself asserts that.
[00:35:56]  But whatever the reason, whether it was officially legalized or not, poppy cultivation immediately returned to pre-Taliban highs.
[00:36:06]  That was by 2002.
[00:36:08]  And then by 2003, it was double Taliban high.
[00:36:11]  So it was like more heroin than had ever been produced in Afghanistan by 2003.
[00:36:18]  By 2004 or so, Afghanistan was producing 200 metric tons of heroin a year.
[00:36:25]  And at the time, that was like jaw-dropping.
[00:36:28]  That's 200 metric tons of pure heroin.
[00:36:30]  So there's more product than that, but that's the amount of pure heroin that it contains, which is a shit ton.
[00:36:36]  And like the second place country, you know, was like 20, I think, 20, 30.
[00:36:40]  Jesus.
[00:36:41]  It was in Mexico or Colombia.
[00:36:44]  But that was nothing.
[00:36:45]  When they were at 200 tons, they were just getting started.
[00:36:49]  By about 2009, 2010, they're producing 1,000 metric tons of heroin per year.
[00:36:56]  So the global supply of heroin increased in very short order by like 5,000%.
[00:37:03]  And Afghanistan started producing 10 times more heroin than the rest of the world combined and did so for 20 years straight, which completely inundated the global supply and caused prices of heroin and purity of heroin, prices of heroin to go down and purity of heroin to go up all over Asia, particularly in Iran, in Russia, all throughout Europe, Australia, and basically the entire world.

=== Heroin's Global Inundation (02:50) ===

[00:37:29]  Yeah, I mean, it was one of those things where I was looking at heroin usage in Pakistan, and it just skyrocketed during this period.
[00:37:41]  I mean, going from like basically unknown, and I'm sure that obviously, I'm sure some people used it, but like as like a social force, pretty much like an unknown, to being like, especially around the border areas, just like junkies everywhere.
[00:37:55]  And there's, I mean, it's tough, it's tough to know what reports to believe about negative things in Iran, just because as astute listeners will know, there's a lot of noise in the zone.
[00:38:09]  But I mean, the reports about drug addiction really skyrocket, especially again in the border areas there too.
[00:38:16]  It's just, I mean, it's heartbreaking.
[00:38:18]  Became like so so, so common um, and this, I mean, I think one of the things that like really strikes me about this is like listen, you know Afghanistan not a very industrialized country, you know there's not a lot of not a lot of big firms uh, operating Afghanistan historically um, and the opium production or the poppy poppy cultivation and then later heroin production um, you know that's a way for people to make money and,
[00:38:48]  like you know, there's there's um, there's some pretty tough things to think about there because, like you know, we have, like we, we we basically came to this country, bombed a bunch of shit and then, like we're occupying it and like doing I don't know what I mean, spending like a billion dollars on a fucking gas station, on like a road with no pavement or whatever and, like you know, bombing hospitals and shit like that.
[00:39:13]  But like there was ostensibly there was this like reconstruction that was supposed to go on.
[00:39:18]  Uh, that seems to have been almost entirely grafted.
[00:39:21]  I think it's pretty well accepted at this point, both graph from our guys and graft from their guys who are working with our guys and and it's like really a dependable thing for, like Afghan farmers was like poppy cultivation and it's like you see this dependency grow in, like the population in of Afghanistan on like okay well, this is like actually a cash crop that people want and we can export um, and so, at the same time as like, heroin is sky listen,
[00:39:50]  I got to tell you great comeback story for heroin huge, huge throughout history, but it's gone.
[00:39:55]  It's gone.
[00:39:56]  Up and down came really back in the 2000s, let me tell you, I it was like being at Woodstock um, but I uh, you know it's it's, it's tough because, like you know, it became essentially like this narco state uh, even more so, and it wasn't just like a narco state like it was in the 90s, it was like a narco state that was like overseen with like U.s military protection.

=== Heroin's Global Supply Chain (14:39) ===

[00:40:20]  I mean, there's the famous photos of like people, you know soldiers, kind of guarding poppy fields essentially, and I know that there was an like one of the sort of famous follies of the early uh war in Afghanistan was the British cash for poppies program, where they would like pay farmers to eradicate their poppy fields uh, and they would like pay them what they have made for the sale of the of the opium.
[00:40:45]  But like people just wouldn't burn their feels understandably, because they're like, i'm a poor farmer, I might as well make it twice as much money.
[00:40:52]  Um, and it seems like I I really can't get a handle on like what the official U.s government response is, because it seems like there's so many different responses from so many different angles on drug cultivation in Afghanistan.
[00:41:06]  So the best resource on this is the SIGAR report from 2018 on counter-narcotics, because they considered exactly that Question.
[00:41:15]  You know, basically, what did the U.S. do?
[00:41:16]  What did they get wrong?
[00:41:18]  Did they get anything right?
[00:41:19]  Yeah.
[00:41:20]  And that report is incredibly damning.
[00:41:23]  And, you know, it's a U.S. government document.
[00:41:26]  So a lot of its most jaw-dropping assertions are kind of couched in this weasel language, or it's just not headline, or it's not really bold font.
[00:41:38]  And you kind of have to read between the lines to some extent.
[00:41:41]  Nevertheless, it's all there.
[00:41:42]  And they basically say that, number one, counter-narcotics was never a priority.
[00:41:47]  You mentioned the British.
[00:41:48]  Well, they pawned it off onto the British because neither the U.S. military flat out refused to do counter-narcotics operations because they thought it was detrimental to their mission.
[00:42:00]  And the CIA also completely refused and instead, in the words of the SIGAR report, prioritize their relationship with significant traffickers.
[00:42:09]  And the report actually names some of the top traffickers that work directly with the CIA.
[00:42:16]  By about, I want to say about 2012 or so, there was a shift in U.S. policy, which was to completely abandon even the pretense of counter-narcotics.
[00:42:28]  Under President Obama's second term, there basically weren't even superficial programs to do anything about it because to date, they have been completely unsuccessful and were met with nothing but resistance, not only from DOD and CIA, but also U.S. AID.
[00:42:45]  There was almost no American agency over there other than the DEA, which had a very small number of officers and who were kept on a very short leash, actually wanted to do anything about drugs.
[00:42:57]  And in the second Obama administration, it just became implicit U.S. policy to allow poppy production to flourish there.
[00:43:05]  And that's when you saw the number of tonnage hit a thousand tons a year.
[00:43:11]  Yeah, you have a great line in the book.
[00:43:13]  You say the military industrial money laundering machine for transatlantic security elites, talking about the Afghani government under U.S. occupation, a corrupt conduit through which trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flowed.
[00:43:26]  But secondarily and most importantly, it was a massive drug cartel that produced nearly all of the world's illicit opiates.
[00:43:33]  And I think that like the question that everyone still wants to know the answer to is like, how are these linked?
[00:43:40]  And why is the U.S. and how is the U.S. profiting off of reconstructing Afghanistan to be literally like the reconstruction was that it was now a narco-state.
[00:43:52]  Like that's how we reconstructed it to be.
[00:43:55]  There's never been a country in world history that was as much of a narco-state as Afghanistan with the economy totally dependent on narcotics production to the near exclusion of everything else except for subsistence farming.
[00:44:10]  With corruption, the Saigar report is especially damning about Afghan national government complicity, starting at the very top, going through every regional governor, every level of government in the municipal, at the municipal level, district level, province level, and national level, the executive branch, the parliament, the courts, the customs system.
[00:44:34]  Every part of the Afghan national government, according to Saigar, was not only directly, was either directly producing poppy and synthesizing heroin or was taking bribes from people that did.
[00:44:49]  So, you know, to call it a cartel is not a metaphor.
[00:44:54]  This is the biggest drug cartel that's ever existed and it was totally created by the U.S. and protected at every step of the way by the U.S.
[00:45:04]  And if the U.S. at any moment had withdrawn its support, it would have instantly collapsed.
[00:45:09]  And this is the same cartel that was responsible for flooding the whole world with heroin at a time of unprecedented addiction and overdose crises.
[00:45:20]  Yeah, I mean, that's what's so astounding to me is right.
[00:45:22]  Is like, I've seen various, you know, percentages bandied about from like 80 to 83 to 93% of the world's heroin was coming out of Afghanistan.
[00:45:32]  But if even the lower estimates are true, which would be around the 80% mark, I mean, like you said, that's the vast majority of the world's dope supply.
[00:45:41]  I mean, that is just a mind-boggling thing.
[00:45:44]  I mean, you really, you have to take a step back and think like our military, our trillions of dollars were sent over there to like, and yeah, you can say like, oh, we were opening like these schools, but like everything was in service of a state that was itself in service of dealing heroin.
[00:46:00]  And like, you know, the almost all the heroin in Britain, almost all the heroin in Europe, we'll get to the U.S. a little later, but the, there's some murkiness around that.
[00:46:11]  But like so much dope just flowed out, like washed over the world.
[00:46:18]  And meanwhile, there's this like this like thing at home where we're taught like, well, we're actually over there to like teach girls how to read and to like prevent the Taliban from doing something.
[00:46:31]  I'm not sure what they were supposed to be doing, but they're from doing something bad that they were going to do.
[00:46:36]  And so we have all our guys over there.
[00:46:38]  We're going to spend trillions of dollars over there.
[00:46:41]  And at the same time, like, yeah, like there's this like huge, I mean, this is 2007, 2008 is like also when heroin itself like really had a strong comeback everywhere with the change of OxyContin formulations and like massive, like cheap dope kind of hitting the streets in America.
[00:47:00]  You know, it's just, it boggles the fucking mind that like our entire foreign policy in like Central in this part of Central Asia was basically based around like assisting cartels of child rapists sell heroin to the world's people.
[00:47:18]  Because you inevitably have to be like, well, so why did the U.S. invade a country to set up a narco-state for you know 20 years?
[00:47:25]  Why did it need to do that?
[00:47:27]  I leave that to readers to interpret.
[00:47:29]  You know, you can come up to maximally nefarious conclusions.
[00:47:33]  But, you know, I don't know how to prove that.
[00:47:35]  I don't have any way of saying that.
[00:47:38]  But what can be proved is what happened in Afghanistan.
[00:47:42]  And the tidal wave, you mentioned Brace like washing over the whole world.
[00:47:48]  That's not a coincidence or that's not like two things that just influenced each other.
[00:47:53]  That is cause and effect.
[00:47:55]  Because when you increase the world supply of heroin by 5,000%, and now it's available almost everywhere, dirt cheap for lower price.
[00:48:04]  So addiction in the United States was for this was softened, of course, famously in the 1990s by loose prescribing practices around painkillers, a whole different topic.
[00:48:16]  So you already had this epidemic of addiction developing in the U.S.
[00:48:21]  But then you combined with the, I think they tried to limit the prescriptions, like prescriptions became hard to get.
[00:48:29]  They had like time release coding, et cetera.
[00:48:32]  At that same time, you had this influx of heroin that costs like a quarter of what an oxycontin pill would cost.
[00:48:39]  And Brace, I'm sure you have more details.
[00:48:43]  When you introduce that much product into the global supply, the result is going to be increased usage.
[00:48:51]  And that's exactly what we saw.
[00:48:53]  And there's no doubt, no one disputes that in Australia, in Russia, in Iran, that all the heroin in all of Europe, all the heroin that they were consuming in the 2000s came from Afghanistan.
[00:49:08]  And initially, there wasn't any confusion around that in the United States either.
[00:49:13]  The DEA reported in the first few years of the Bush administration that heroin, that they were increasingly seizing heroin from Afghanistan, that the amount of Afghan product being consumed with the United States was rising.
[00:49:30]  And then around 2008, a sudden shift in the tone of DEA documents takes place.
[00:49:39]  And they begin asserting that none of the heroin consumed in the United States, which at that time had a full-blown heroin crisis.
[00:49:47]  They started saying, well, none of this stuff is coming from Afghanistan.
[00:49:51]  And if you, there's not that much reporting contemporaneously about, you know, trying to link or just about heroin production in Afghanistan.
[00:50:00]  Period.
[00:50:00]  There's not much.
[00:50:01]  To the extent it exists, most of the articles state somewhere in there.
[00:50:06]  They'll say, you know, all this heroin is being produced in Afghanistan under U.S. occupation.
[00:50:11]  They might even hint or say that some Afghan national government figures are involved in it.
[00:50:18]  But they'll always include this caveat that says, well, none of this heroin in the U.S. is coming from Afghanistan.
[00:50:24]  Less than 1% is the official figure.
[00:50:26]  Yeah, which is, I mean, that to me just seems ridiculous.
[00:50:30]  I mean, it's funny.
[00:50:34]  I have like, I mean, West Coast, it's different.
[00:50:37]  Like West Coast, we have a different kind of heroin than they got other places.
[00:50:40]  I don't know how far the tar belt extends into the U.S., but like there's basically two kinds of dope in the U.S., which is like tar heroin, which I could always tell came from Mexico because it looks like mole.
[00:50:53]  And then you have fucking powdered heroin, which is like a, we used to call it China white, but then I was looking that up and they're like, China white is fentanyl.
[00:51:02]  I'm like, no, that's not what that is.
[00:51:05]  China white is powdered heroin, but you know, whatever.
[00:51:09]  And that is like that.
[00:51:13]  I always was like, well, the heroin they're getting other places is coming from somewhere else because why would they just like the same cartel make two different kinds of heroin, one of which is like bulkier, like the tar is like sort of like these kind of like thick rocks.
[00:51:26]  And the heroin on the East Coast and like elsewhere in the country is powdered, which seems like a lot more, well, easier to get around.
[00:51:35]  You know, it's a lot smaller, more discreet.
[00:51:37]  And so I just was, I was always so confused by that.
[00:51:42]  And like, you know, I read these statistics that were like, yeah, no, there's no Afghan dope coming in.
[00:51:46]  I was like, okay, well, maybe that's true.
[00:51:48]  And then, you know, you sent me that LA Times article.
[00:51:52]  And then you also, I don't know if you, you posted somewhere or you sent me, I don't know, but like showed that like there were things, the statistics saying that like 90% of the heroin in Canada was from Afghanistan.
[00:52:04]  And you just got to think like, wait, well, why would 90%, how could 90% of the heroin, like, you know, a few hours from New York City be from one place?
[00:52:14]  And then 90% here is from another place.
[00:52:16]  Like, you know, I expect exactly Mexico.
[00:52:19]  But like, do we even know that the heroin is, the poppies are grown in Mexico?
[00:52:23]  Like, obviously they do grow poppies down there.
[00:52:24]  There are poppy fields in Mexico, but like, is it just like brought into the country from there?
[00:52:29]  And then, you know, I was asking, I was asking someone I know who, you know, more on the chemistry side of things about, hey, how does the DEA know this stuff?
[00:52:39]  And it's like, well, they're kind of just guess, you know, a lot of the times.
[00:52:43]  So there's clear answers to all these questions that you raise, but the picture is muddled initially by other things that were going on at the time.
[00:52:52]  Specifically, an increase in heroin production in Mexico was actually taking place.
[00:52:56]  Yeah.
[00:52:58]  They were making more black tar heroin in states like Guerrero and in Sinaloa.
[00:53:03]  And there's a great book called Dreamland, which I read in an attempt to understand this.
[00:53:10]  The author's name is Sam Quinoa.
[00:53:12]  I'm pronouncing it wrong.
[00:53:14]  The book is called Dreamland by Sam Q.
[00:53:17]  And it's about the development of these really entrepreneurial Mexican distribution networks in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s.
[00:53:30]  So they did make inroads into distributing heroin in the United States, but it was all the sort of black tar type of heroin.
[00:53:38]  And Brace, if you could remind me, when were the years when you were actually using, if you don't mind?
[00:53:43]  So I first did heroin in 2008, but I was like a junkie junk.
[00:53:47]  I mean, I was a junkie before that, but I switched to fully, fully switched to heroin in about 2010, I would say, and continued into 2014.
[00:53:59]  And you say you always smoked black tar?
[00:54:01]  No, I smoked it at first because actually I snorted it at first, which is really gross because you're snorting liquid, hot liquid that burnt.
[00:54:09]  It's just disgusting.
[00:54:10]  It's fucking disgusting.
[00:54:12]  And then I smoked it for like maybe a few months.
[00:54:14]  It was a pretty brief thing because I, you know, like many people, I said I would never shoot it.
[00:54:18]  And then, you know, you just end up shooting it because you can use less.
[00:54:21]  And it just, it's, it's how it goes for everybody, basically.
[00:54:25]  But there was only, only black tar heroin.
[00:54:30]  Actually, I have to correct myself.
[00:54:31]  The first heroin I ever did was not tar because somebody I knew was somebody was coming back from the East Coast with it, I knew.
[00:54:41]  And so I did powder, but that was East Coast powder heroin, like literally from New York City.
[00:54:48]  And, but on the street, and I bought, you know, I had regular dealers.
[00:54:54]  I had maybe like four or five guys that I went to for like extended periods of time.

=== Debunking Afghan Heroin Myths (15:45) ===

[00:54:59]  But I also bought on the street sometimes and those guys weren't available.
[00:55:02]  And there was never any question that you could get anything except for tar.
[00:55:07]  And I'm sure that in some cases it's available to some people, but I, you know, I spent a lot of time in an open-air drug market of the tenderloin and I and I bought heroin from a diverse set of people that was mostly heroin.
[00:55:20]  Sometimes it was catch it.
[00:55:21]  And well, not me, but the guy I know did that.
[00:55:24]  And I'm serious.
[00:55:25]  And I bet, I guarantee you, he was thinking about shooting it to see if there was something in there.
[00:55:30]  And the only time I was able to buy what was sold to me as China White heroin was from my dope dealer who had MS, who I sometimes had to go to the hospital to buy dope from him.
[00:55:41]  He said, I'm getting some China white in.
[00:55:44]  Do you want it?
[00:55:45]  And it was really overpriced, but he said it's more powerful.
[00:55:49]  So it actually is a better deal.
[00:55:51]  And I shot it in the bathroom of the Sears in downtown Oakland and passed out for four hours.
[00:55:57]  And it felt weird.
[00:55:58]  And I didn't have euphoria of the euphoric sort of high you got from it.
[00:56:02]  And later I put together that it was probably fentanyl because that was when it was like fentanyl was starting to be made and like first introduced into like the drug supply in the way that it was.
[00:56:16]  But no, there was no white.
[00:56:17]  And that was the only thing there was never any China white, like ever.
[00:56:20]  I never saw it except for the single time that, or not the single time, the multiple times that I was able to get it from the East Coast.
[00:56:27]  But yeah, not available whatsoever in the West Coast drug market.
[00:56:31]  Well, I think that your experience was a reflect was a reflection of geography because most of the China white is imported by air to New York, Chicago, Detroit, and is distributed like in New England and the Midwest and in Appalachia.
[00:56:50]  Whereas a lot of the Mexican stuff is trafficked more up towards the West and in California.
[00:56:56]  I'm a little bit surprised that you never saw any China white at all because the DEA's numbers show an increased amount of white heroin coming into the U.S. steadily all the way from 2001 up until like 2017 or so.
[00:57:13]  It was always on the increase.
[00:57:15]  And the only question was, where is it coming from?
[00:57:18]  And I really had to drill down into this question because I just felt strongly that there were all these articles that were saying that less than 1% of U.S. heroin is Afghan in origin.
[00:57:30]  And you have all these confident top line DEA assertions.
[00:57:33]  And it's like saying no oil from Saudi Arabia has ever burned in the United States.
[00:57:38]  It just can't be true.
[00:57:40]  That's just not how global capitalism works.
[00:57:42]  And the drug industry is highly globalized.
[00:57:46]  So I tried to dig down and understand how the DEA actually estimates its market origin.
[00:57:54]  And I found that they had two programs upon which these assertions were based, the heroin domestic monitoring program and another one called like the heroin sampling program, something like that.
[00:58:06]  Both programs involve taking samples that are either acquired through undercover buys or that are taken from seizures and then analyzed in a laboratory for specific chemical traces that show where or that tell the DEA where it came from.
[00:58:23]  Now, I could never get the DEA to explain what those chemical traces were.
[00:58:26]  They never responded to any of my inquiries.
[00:58:29]  I wrote them lots of letters, called them, emailed them.
[00:58:32]  They never responded.
[00:58:34]  But I looked at all the data that I could find or all their own publications.
[00:58:38]  And just reading those, it's clear that they have no idea what they're talking about or are affirmatively lying at the behest of God knows who, putting this in the reports, coming to this conclusion.
[00:58:52]  at the request of higher-ups, which incidentally is something that is a common experience in the life of DEA agents and officials.
[00:58:58]  They're often leaned upon by more powerful agencies and political figures to do certain things.
[00:59:03]  But in any case, these two programs, the reason why they're suspect, one is that they don't count seizures from airports.
[00:59:11]  As I said, all Afghan heroin comes by air.
[00:59:14]  It doesn't come over land and it doesn't come by boat.
[00:59:16]  It's all done by couriers by air.
[00:59:19]  The other thing is they don't count any seizures that are above $200 in value.
[00:59:24]  I don't know why.
[00:59:25]  Wait, what?
[00:59:26]  That seems to just completely skew things.
[00:59:29]  I don't understand why.
[00:59:31]  I don't understand that.
[00:59:32]  But that's why I'm saying that their claims of geographic market share are riddled by untenable assumptions and selection biases that make them meaningless in the end.
[00:59:45]  Because they do count seizures at the southern border, which of course is where all the Mexican heroin is coming from.
[00:59:53]  Also, they're sampling tilts towards the West and towards California.
[00:59:58]  But even with all that being said, the DEA still found that about 60% of the heroin coming to the United States around like 2010, this is a wide swath of years we're talking about, consistent over time, very consistent long-term trends.
[01:00:13]  And one of them was more and more China white heroin being seized at the southern border.
[01:00:20]  And they were at a loss to explain this in the first years that they reported on it because as we've been talking about, heroin from Mexico is famously black tar.
[01:00:28]  Lower in quality, different color, heavier weight.
[01:00:31]  Hey, bro.
[01:00:34]  I'm right here.
[01:00:39]  So a big question that shows up for several years is the DEA trying to make sense of this apparent anomaly, which they themselves call an intelligence gap.
[01:00:49]  Interesting.
[01:00:49]  And they eventually jerry-rig this conclusion that is almost laughable, which is to say that this stuff, they call it alleged Mexican white.
[01:01:00]  And they just presume that Mexican cartels somehow found a way to synthesize heroin into what's called China white.
[01:01:09]  By the way, during this time, for some reason, the DEA has zero, because another question I looked at was, well, how many hectares in Mexico are under poppy cultivation?
[01:01:17]  Because that's something you can look up for Afghanistan.
[01:01:19]  For Mexico, there's none of that data.
[01:01:21]  I don't know why.
[01:01:22]  Have it.
[01:01:25]  But I do know from talking to people anecdotally, like in various states of Mexico, that yeah, the narco was was taking people's land, more and more people's land, to grow heroin.
[01:01:35]  I think it was expanding anyway.
[01:01:38]  Um, the point is that they just decided to slap this made-up nomenclature on all the heroines being smuggled across the border, and I suspect I can't prove this, but I think that Mexican trafficking organizations, being extremely sophisticated and entrepreneurial and globalized, were simply buying heroin from middlemen, whether it was from West Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey.
[01:02:01]  They could have been getting Afghan heroin for anywhere.
[01:02:03]  It was so, so cheap.
[01:02:05]  Like it's so much cheaper to just go out and buy Afghan heroin.
[01:02:08]  When Afghanistan is producing a thousand tons and you're producing 50, your whole country, obviously it's going to be cheaper to go and get that other stuff.
[01:02:16]  Even if it means you have to take a flight, even if it means you got to pay a bunch of couriers to break it up and take it on commercial airliners.
[01:02:22]  All that is doable.
[01:02:23]  That's their business.
[01:02:24]  And they have sophisticated trafficking and smuggling distribution networks in the United States.
[01:02:29]  You know, a lot of people will say, well, the Afghans, you know, the Afghan narcos have no way to infiltrate their product with the U.S., which is true, but they can just simply sell it wholesale to people who do.
[01:02:40]  I mean, Los Zetas or whatever, the Gulf Cartel, they can put drugs at any point in the United States you want.
[01:02:46]  They've got people everywhere.
[01:02:49]  So that's what I suspect.
[01:02:50]  I can't prove it.
[01:02:51]  What I can say for a fact is that there was lots and lots of white heroin and the DEA doesn't know where it came from.
[01:02:56]  So they just made up a label and just cruised on ahead to say, yep, it's all coming from Mexico.
[01:03:01]  Wow.
[01:03:03]  That's crazy.
[01:03:04]  I had no idea about that.
[01:03:06]  Yeah, I think one of the things that you really got to look at too, you know, to understand this is like these distribution networks that were coming out of Afghanistan, right?
[01:03:19]  Like there's like the heroin was being pushed basically all over like a huge part of the world.
[01:03:27]  And so like what you're talking about where like they don't actually have to go to Afghanistan to get this.
[01:03:32]  They can go to like Djibouti or like the Balkans.
[01:03:34]  And like that, that's where like a lot of the heroin is trafficked through or fucking Iran or Pakistan.
[01:03:40]  Like these are not impossible places to get to and purchase it there and then bring it for refinement in Mexico, step on it like a motherfucker and then sell it to people all over the U.S.
[01:03:52]  And I think I think even beyond that too, like even, okay, fine.
[01:03:59]  DEA, there's no heroin from the biggest heroin state in the world that ever makes into the U.S. You are protecting even like, which is bullshit, but like you are still protecting the poppy fields that are like poisoning basically every country in the world.
[01:04:17]  I mean, 80% to 93% is such a staggeringly high number that I just, and I know we've talked about this during this episode.
[01:04:25]  I just like can't get it through my head.
[01:04:27]  Like this shit fucking ruined my life.
[01:04:29]  Like years and years and years of my life.
[01:04:32]  It has killed so many fucking people that I'm not only, I know, but I'm sure many people listening has killed some of your friends too.
[01:04:40]  And it's like our fucking trillions of dollars of tax money, which.
[01:04:47]  you know, especially when that was being spent on the countries, you know, at one point of it was in a recession.
[01:04:53]  Our shit is fucked.
[01:04:54]  Try riding the fucking, the G-train sometimes.
[01:04:58]  You know, like our country fucking sucks for the most part.
[01:05:03]  And we're just like sending like trillions of dollars to like heroin dealers.
[01:05:07]  It just, it, it, again, like, it just boggles my fucking mind.
[01:05:11]  And like, and to get Osama bin Laden when he's, you know, being protected by the military, our friends in the Pakistani military, like, you know, just south of the border, it's just, it's so insane to me.
[01:05:26]  Yeah, I, I really, uh, my head was spinning as I was researching this and it was coming more and more into view, the gravity of, of what had happened, especially the consequences it had all over the entire developed world and the undeveloped world as well.
[01:05:41]  Um, we've already talked about Iran.
[01:05:43]  You know, the country with the highest rate of drug use in the world is Afghanistan.
[01:05:48]  Something like a third to, excuse me, a quarter to a third of Afghans actually use opiates.
[01:05:55]  And, you know, it is a poison.
[01:05:57]  It's like, I said to you before, it's almost like a type of chemical warfare.
[01:06:02]  And so I completely share, you know, your sense of outrage.
[01:06:06]  Well, I think one thing we, I don't know if it was, we were talking about this before we started recording.
[01:06:10]  I think we were.
[01:06:11]  So we should mention it again.
[01:06:13]  If you Google opium Afghanistan, even if you Google like U.S. complicity in opium trade Afghanistan, every single fucking hit you get is just going to be the Taliban are the biggest drug dealers in the world.
[01:06:28]  And, you know, I'm just, you know, for from a completely, if I had to guess and you like were like, well, Brace, do you think that like the Taliban sells drugs?
[01:06:37]  I'm like, well, would I sell drugs if I was the Taliban?
[01:06:40]  I would.
[01:06:41]  You know, because you need some money sometimes.
[01:06:43]  And also like, you know, yeah, you need some money.
[01:06:47]  Well, you also probably looked at this machine that was set up and you're like, hey, let's kick out the guys running that machine so we could run this machine.
[01:06:52]  Exactly.
[01:06:53]  But even if you're not doing it as much as you maybe would be doing it.
[01:06:57]  There's so many portrayals of like the Taliban.
[01:06:59]  The Taliban is behind this.
[01:07:00]  The Taliban is behind this.
[01:07:02]  And if you look into the details, it seems like, well, no, it seems like the Afghan national government, which is the government in charge of the country, was behind it.
[01:07:11]  And, you know, there's, there's these reports of the, of the Taliban taxing poppy growth, which I guess makes sense because that's basically the only thing that we're growing in some parts of the country.
[01:07:20]  It's the only thing, only tax revenue that's coming out.
[01:07:22]  And I also, there's no indication.
[01:07:25]  I don't know.
[01:07:26]  I mean, it could be, but like you just read a sentence like that, like, okay, well, are they taxing people and the people's money came from poppy growth?
[01:07:33]  Are they taxing specific like poppy yields?
[01:07:36]  I don't know.
[01:07:37]  And again, like, I'm not saying I don't know because nobody knows.
[01:07:39]  I'm saying I don't know because I don't know.
[01:07:41]  But it's, it's strange.
[01:07:44]  And like, and there's all these reports from like right during, like prior to and then immediately after the U.S. hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, actually long, long, long time withdrawal from Afghanistan about like the Taliban are about to be this like narcos.
[01:08:02]  The Taliban are going to be the narcos.
[01:08:03]  The Taliban are going to be the narcos.
[01:08:04]  This is a terror, like terror poppies funding, you know, whatever, you know, all those Taliban terror attacks and, you know, Milwaukee or whatever.
[01:08:15]  And it just, you know, it seems so convenient that this is like now almost like sort of an accepted thing.
[01:08:22]  And I know that you've been pointing out that like a lot of like reporters report this as if it's a fact.
[01:08:28]  Yeah.
[01:08:28]  Well, that's the benefit of accusing your enemy of doing exactly what you're doing.
[01:08:33]  Because then people that try to make sense of that will feel confused.
[01:08:38]  It will be, it's paradoxically difficult to refute when you just tell the 180 degree opposite of the truth.
[01:08:47]  And like I said, like you were saying, if you Google anything about this or search any search engine about this, every single mainstream institution of media or government in the United States asserts that the Taliban was behind all the narcotics production in Afghanistan.
[01:09:05]  It's just taken as a given.
[01:09:07]  And yeah, I posted the other day a book I just read.
[01:09:10]  And I don't even want to pick on this guy who's a security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
[01:09:15]  He wrote a book called 20 Years.
[01:09:16]  His name is Soon Ingle Rosmusson.
[01:09:19]  I don't even have that much to quibble with about his book itself, but he does assert.
[01:09:23]  He barely talks about drugs in Afghanistan, which is kind of missing the point of a war in my view.
[01:09:28]  But he asserts like four or five times in there, just as a fact, that the Taliban funded its insurgency through narcotics.
[01:09:36]  And that book was just published, just favorably reviewed in the New Yorker.
[01:09:41]  And in the next issue of the New Yorker, this week's issue or last week's, there was another article.
[01:09:47]  It's that weird Captagon article about Syria.
[01:09:50]  Oh, yeah, I didn't read that yet.
[01:09:52]  You should definitely read it.
[01:09:54]  But one of the things that asserts as an aside is that the Taliban funded, he presents a sort of laundry list.
[01:10:06]  Ed Cesar, I think, is the Cesar, I think is the reporter.
[01:10:10]  He searches like this laundry list of military groups that fund their operation through drugs.
[01:10:15]  And the Taliban is just on that list.
[01:10:17]  It is just received wisdom that you get from every single level of cultural and governmental authority in the United States.
[01:10:27]  And I tried to probe the veracity of this and found to my amazement that there's absolutely nothing there, like zero, nothing.
[01:10:36]  Not only that, but it completely goes against the history of the Taliban and misunderstands them so fundamentally that I almost don't even know where to start.

=== Ephedra's Importance Questioned (12:52) ===

[01:10:45]  But I was so driven crazy by this.
[01:10:48]  Like I don't work through research assistants.
[01:10:49]  I do my own reporting.
[01:10:51]  But in this one case, I actually hired a research assistant.
[01:10:55]  Shout out if Julia Gludhill is listening.
[01:10:57]  She's an analyst at the Stimson Center.
[01:10:59]  And I told her, look, I want you to prove me wrong.
[01:11:05]  Find some Taliban figure who we know was a figure of even marginal importance, but someone who was definitely a member of the Taliban and who had some role of some importance, who was definitely shown to have been trafficking drugs.
[01:11:19]  So she went off and tried her best, dug through a bunch of court records and stuff, came back with like four cases, which not coincidentally are about the same four that you'll find if you start Googling around.
[01:11:32]  These are the cases that they'll be held up.
[01:11:35]  And, you know, so first of all, there's very few of them, very few to deal with.
[01:11:39]  They all come from around the 2005 time period.
[01:11:42]  And I was unable, so, and I don't want to get too deep in the weeds on those individuals, but either they were someone who had links to the Taliban, wasn't actually a Taliban fighter, or wasn't actually a Taliban official or figure.
[01:11:58]  There's someone who just says, well, you worked with the Taliban.
[01:12:01]  Or in two other cases, it was someone who demonstrably had links to the CIA, was actually working for the other side.
[01:12:11]  So one that comes up a lot.
[01:12:13]  I get all their names confused.
[01:12:15]  I'm sorry.
[01:12:15]  I really have no facility with the languages of Southwest Asia.
[01:12:20]  But there's a guy called, I think it's Haji Juma Khan.
[01:12:23]  I just want to pause on this one case because it's such an amazing.
[01:12:26]  Yeah, it's Juma Khan or Haji Juma Khan.
[01:12:28]  Haji, I think, is just an honorific.
[01:12:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:31]  So this just means it means unknown.
[01:12:36]  It's just an amazing Wikipedia page.
[01:12:39]  But this is the guy who allegedly went on to run the Taliban's entire opium heroin distribution network, selling worldwide and using the profits to equip Taliban forces militarily.
[01:12:53]  That's what his Wikipedia page says.
[01:12:55]  But I knew this guy's name rang a bell.
[01:12:57]  So I went back and looked at that Saigar report.
[01:13:00]  And he's one of the people that Saigar specifically calls out by name as being a CIA asset that the CIA worked with rather than participating in counter-narcotics operations.
[01:13:10]  And also he was strangely, they somehow got him to go to New York and arrested him and then mysteriously released him in 2018 without any comment the U.S. government did.
[01:13:21]  So this is the person who is more than any of the four or five figures that my research assistant could come up with.
[01:13:31]  This one was like the leading candidate, let's say.
[01:13:34]  This is a real person of Taliban importance.
[01:13:36]  And he was clearly a CIA asset who they sent back to Afghanistan.
[01:13:44]  So there is no single case that I know of.
[01:13:48]  And it's possible that I'm missing some, but there's no single case that I know of of a named Taliban official being directly implicated or implicated for a fact in drug trafficking.
[01:14:00]  Whereas if you look at the Afghan national government, there's like dozens of them.
[01:14:03]  There's an unlimited quantity of people.
[01:14:05]  You can say this person was definitely participating in the drug trade.
[01:14:09]  We know his name.
[01:14:09]  We know where he was based, what years, et cetera.
[01:14:14]  So all that being said, there is always going to be an element of a black box when you're dealing with the Taliban because it was a force that's hostile to our country that we're fighting a war with.
[01:14:26]  You never really know what they were doing.
[01:14:27]  You can't say it for a fact.
[01:14:29]  That's why I think it's more important to focus on what they have done when they actually controlled the country.
[01:14:35]  And we know that when they controlled the country in 2000 or in the 1990s up to 2001, they eradicated all the drugs that were in Afghanistan.
[01:14:45]  And then the conclusion of this whole epic story is going to be when they come back in 2021 and then over 2022 and 2023, do an exact repeat of what they did in 2000 and completely eradicate all the poppy cultivation and heroin synthesis in Afghanistan.
[01:15:04]  And in both cases, they just totally decimated the world supply of heroin.
[01:15:08]  Yeah.
[01:15:08]  So, I mean, I've read various sort of there's been kind of two lines of reporting, I guess, about that.
[01:15:15]  One is the sort of think pieces on like, don't, like, the Taliban ending poppy cultivation is actually a bad thing.
[01:15:25]  Although, and it's funny because like there is weirdly some, there is some logic to that that I actually follow that I don't think is as like, you don't want a headline like that.
[01:15:35]  But like, there is, I think, a non-malicious way, like aspect to that that I think isn't immediately apparent on reading that appalling headline.
[01:15:45]  And then there is, there is like, like, these guys are full of shit.
[01:15:50]  Like, they're going to do it.
[01:15:50]  They're going to, they're still going to keep it.
[01:15:52]  Like, they're just lying.
[01:15:53]  And then, yeah, I mean, that's basically it.
[01:15:57]  Oh, and then there's all the reports that now they're now they're the big meth heads.
[01:16:00]  They're doing ephedra now.
[01:16:03]  They're cultivating ephedra.
[01:16:05]  And I want to talk about the first thing.
[01:16:07]  Can we pause one second?
[01:16:09]  I want to address both of those.
[01:16:10]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:16:11]  So the ephedra-methamphetamine one, read closely, you'll find that the actual stats come from before the Taliban took power.
[01:16:19]  And then, sorry, I forgot the other one you said.
[01:16:21]  No, well, I think the first one we should talk about actually, or well, not second, because the ephedra thing, I'm like, buddy, we don't need ephedra for meth anymore.
[01:16:28]  We're way past that point.
[01:16:30]  But the, but the, the, the one I'm going to talk about is the warnings against the cultivation or the eradication of cultivation.
[01:16:39]  And I think that there is, there is a logic to that, right?
[01:16:43]  Because when the U.S. left Afghanistan, very famously, we were like, fuck you guys.
[01:16:49]  We're like, we're going to like, you're going to be iced out of the international community.
[01:16:52]  We're cutting you off from the banking system.
[01:16:54]  No trade.
[01:16:55]  Like, like, stop.
[01:16:56]  Stop the North Korea treatment.
[01:16:58]  Exactly.
[01:16:59]  Exactly.
[01:16:59]  Yeah.
[01:17:00]  And so some of these are like, listen, they shouldn't cut it off because like no one's going to have any money and there's no food coming in.
[01:17:06]  There's no like aid or whatever.
[01:17:08]  I think that they started.
[01:17:09]  And again, like this is not exactly my wheelhouse.
[01:17:12]  And so if I'm wrong, please forgive me.
[01:17:16]  The U.S. eventually like allowed some aid in there, like food aid.
[01:17:21]  But like, you know, basically like the economy was really dependent on this stuff.
[01:17:29]  I mean, this was a narco-state.
[01:17:31]  And like there is now, I mean, massive, massive, massive poverty in Afghanistan.
[01:17:38]  And like, you know, people basically on the brink, especially, you know, there's Kabul, but like everyone else kind of lives out in the country.
[01:17:45]  Most other people kind of live out in the country.
[01:17:46]  And like there's some population centers, obviously, but like it, it has, there has, it's a tough time for Afghanistan right now.
[01:17:55]  And one can't help but think like, well, okay, maybe, maybe, okay, I think maybe my solution is like the Taliban should actually stop the poppy cultivation, but also like, we should let them have more food.
[01:18:11]  Yeah.
[01:18:11]  That makes sense to me.
[01:18:13]  Yeah.
[01:18:14]  Well, to me, the Taliban's choice to eradicate the whole industry, despite its predictable effects on poverty in Afghanistan, just goes to show like, you know, a leopard can't really change its spots.
[01:18:29]  Like that's just who they are.
[01:18:30]  They're an anti-drugs force.
[01:18:32]  And I eventually just learned to just completely shut out and ignore virtually all the reporting or just the surface level writing about this that you're referring to.
[01:18:44]  Because I realize these writers, these reporters, they simply don't know what they're talking about.
[01:18:49]  They don't know the history.
[01:18:50]  They don't know the specifics.
[01:18:52]  They're just repeating some other article that they read and then throwing in their bigoted opinion.
[01:19:00]  And there's nothing more to it than that.
[01:19:03]  You know, the predictions that with the Taliban in power, they were going to turn into just this unimpeded narco-state.
[01:19:10]  Like, oh, once we get the U.S. out of there, there'll be no one trying to eradicate narcotics and the Taliban will run wild.
[01:19:16]  The exact opposite happened.
[01:19:19]  You know, the Taliban, they completely eliminated about 95% of Afghanistan's poppy product, poppy harvest.
[01:19:30]  The only place where it still persists, just like in the 1990s, or excuse me, just like in the first time that the Taliban eradicated drugs in the late 90s and early 2000s, it survives in this pocket that's outside of Taliban control in the north by Tajikistan, which is like the sort of base camp for U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan, always has been.
[01:19:55]  So it would be 100% if it wasn't for that, if it weren't for their lack of control over Badakhshan and those areas by Tajikistan.
[01:20:04]  And the fact that the Taliban did that, it's kind of like their thing with, you know, with women's rights.
[01:20:11]  Some people had thought that like, well, the Taliban is going to ease up this time around and allow, you know, women to go to school and travel without an escort and that sort of thing.
[01:20:22]  And they just didn't.
[01:20:23]  They just didn't.
[01:20:23]  They went back to who they were from the beginning.
[01:20:26]  That's they are very, very, you know, ideologically fixed in their mentality.
[01:20:32]  And one of those things is their opposition to drugs.
[01:20:35]  And all throughout the war, the Taliban, the actual Taliban, because by the way, another thing confusing the picture, which I think is really important to mention, I know what you're about, is that the U.S. never had any fucking clue who the Taliban were.
[01:20:47]  And if you talk to any, like from the, from a private first class in the infantry, all the way up to the commander at JSOC, they will tell you the same thing.
[01:20:54]  Like, we really didn't know who was shooting at us.
[01:20:56]  We called them all the Taliban.
[01:20:58]  Yeah, I want to just like real quick.
[01:21:00]  You mean that literally?
[01:21:01]  Like they literally didn't know who they were.
[01:21:04]  Just so it's not like figurative of speech.
[01:21:07]  Like they didn't, they had, you know, this goes back to your point earlier.
[01:21:10]  It was like bad U.S. intelligence gathering, just kind of like laziness, all this, I don't know, like easy racism, probably, like, and not caring, but that they literally didn't know who these guys were.
[01:21:24]  Yeah.
[01:21:25]  And that becomes confusing because there's one place in Afghanistan that's very important to all of us, which of course is the Hellman, which is about where half of the product, half of the global product is produced.
[01:21:39]  So half of the opiates in the world are produced in this one valley in Afghanistan, which Hamid Karzai's brother controlled by his control of Kandahar.
[01:21:48]  And they also had the people from the clan of Akhunzada there.
[01:21:52]  Nassim Akhunzada's relatives were controlling the Hellman on behalf of the Karzai government.
[01:21:58]  And there is no doubt, there's no debate that all those people were major narcotics traffickers.
[01:22:05]  Stanley McChrystal, the commander of JSOC, calls them in his memoir, he calls them a durable drug cartel.
[01:22:11]  And he also admits, by the way, that they were kidnapping and raping little boys.
[01:22:16]  But so that's who controlled it on behalf of the U.S.
[01:22:19]  They were some of the biggest and most powerful traffickers in the Afghan national government.
[01:22:23]  But from time to time during the war, control over the Hellman actually slipped out of these people's hands.
[01:22:30]  And if you read the New York Times or whatever, it says that it was the Taliban that they were fighting there.
[01:22:35]  And I have never been able to understand, or I should say, it's been very difficult to piece together who was in control of Hellman and what times.
[01:22:45]  I haven't found a good answer for that, especially after about 2011 and 2012.
[01:22:49]  But I know that there was a lot of fighting there.
[01:22:51]  And that's where you hear the most allegations around Taliban control of the drug industry.
[01:22:57]  And this is another one of those things that I can't prove, but I speculate based on what I have been able to learn that these were just like unaffiliated drug traffickers, basically, or drug traffickers that were fighting for control of this area.
[01:23:11]  And simply because they shot at U.S. troops, they were labeled Taliban.
[01:23:15]  But whether they were actually fighting on behalf of the real Taliban regime, which was a real thing that existed in the Pakistani city of Quetta and also in, I think, Doha, Dubai, whether they were actually affiliated.
[01:23:30]  And that's the kind of thing it's hard to answer because you can't really talk to the Taliban directly and the U.S. simply doesn't know.

=== Why We Sold Heroin (02:42) ===

[01:23:37]  Yeah.
[01:23:38]  And it's funny because we spent these trillions of dollars there.
[01:23:44]  Like that is mind-boggling.
[01:23:47]  Like, what did we spend it on?
[01:23:50]  We spent these trillions of dollars there.
[01:23:52]  I'm sure that our intelligence agencies got some money from this drug trafficking too.
[01:23:57]  Like, I'm sorry, but like it just, you know, using history as a guide, like there was a lot of dipping into that kind of stuff from our.
[01:24:06]  Well, you get paid off the top so that you move it some when you move it somewhere else.
[01:24:10]  That's how it all, you know, it's going from one place to another.
[01:24:13]  But it also helps you keep, keep, it helps keep you do, or it helps you do things that are maybe, you know, one of the budget line item thing.
[01:24:20]  Not that they're ever going to be audited.
[01:24:23]  But, you know, it's just astounding to me.
[01:24:28]  And now there's an, I read this like sort of worried article.
[01:24:33]  I can't remember where.
[01:24:34]  I think maybe a Wilson Center about how the Chinese are moving into Afghanistan now.
[01:24:39]  The dreaded Chinese industry is going to move in there um, specifically to get at the rare earth minerals that uh, of which various reports, including ones from the government, say there's a trillion dollars worth sitting under Afghanistan.
[01:24:53]  Um, and and it it makes one wonder like well wait, so like we were there for like decades and didn't do any of that, like didn't help them start any kind of industry like that like really, I mean, there's some drug industry.
[01:25:07]  We did, we did yeah, that's, you're right, you're right right, but like um, the Chinese are in there and it's like been like a year, like two years, and they're like they're they're doing all this and they're gonna add, they're they're talking about putting them into, like the, the Pakistan uh, China quarter part of Belt And Road.
[01:25:23]  It's like well, this seems like a lot more effective than like um, selling heroin, and so, and like maybe maybe, better for the country frankly, better for the world.
[01:25:33]  So i'm like, well then why why, why were we doing the selling heroin route?
[01:25:37]  And you know, the answers I feel like are pretty obvious right like, first of all, it's easier.
[01:25:41]  Second of all, like it allows us to like be in cahoots with, like these these, you know these criminal warlords who, like we needed or wanted to like do our dirty work there right, like it's.
[01:25:54]  It's not that not that the owners of mines have never killed anybody um, and not that criminal gangs have never controlled mines, but it is uh, it's just, it's so mind-boggling, like it's like, and when I have to say like it's like they wanted all the heroin out there, you know, it's like, it's chemical warfare in Afghanistan yeah, but it's also chemical warfare in Pakistan, chemical warfare in Iran, chemical warfare in Russia and on Europe and on almost certainly America as well.

=== China's Watchful Eye (04:45) ===

[01:26:20]  China too China yeah um, not the first time someone's done that to them um, the the China Afghan relations are um, really interesting.
[01:26:32]  I don't know too much about it um, and I won't pretend to know more than I do, but the.
[01:26:39]  If you just look at a map, there's this interesting little extension of Afghanistan that reaches right up to the Chinese border, and that's that area that I was talking about earlier.
[01:26:49]  Badakhshan uh, and also areas further up into towards Tajikistan, at the foot of the Hindu Kush, and these are all the areas where the Us has basically collected um security forces over the years to to do its bidding.
[01:27:04]  It's where the Northern Alliance was based.
[01:27:06]  It's where the anti-Russian Mujahideen were based.
[01:27:09]  And now it's where ISIS-K is based.
[01:27:11]  ISIS-K is made up of the remnants.
[01:27:15]  ISIS-ketamine.
[01:27:17]  It's largely made up of the remnants of the U.S. client state.
[01:27:21]  And so when I think about, so on the other side of that, on the other side of the border is the region of China where the Uyghurs live.
[01:27:33]  And so all during this period.
[01:27:36]  from the 2000s to the 2010s, we heard constantly that China was suppressing the Uyghur population.
[01:27:46]  And I'll leave it at that.
[01:27:48]  Like, I don't really know.
[01:27:49]  Maybe they probably were.
[01:27:50]  I mean, China is an ethno-state.
[01:27:54]  I don't think that China, you know, has a sort of government culture of respecting. minorities in the same way that we supposedly do under like the Civil Rights Act and so forth.
[01:28:06]  Anyway, I put myself in the mind of a Chinese security official, you know, stripped of all the sort of priors that we have as an American, looking at the situation.
[01:28:15]  It's like, what would you do?
[01:28:17]  You're confronted with this region on the other side of the border where you have all these U.S. military and intelligence forces that you know are hostile to your country.
[01:28:25]  They've used this region for years as a place to cook up plots to destabilize the people that they don't like.
[01:28:32]  You should probably keep a pretty firm control on that border region and keep an eye on the people that are coming back and forth in there.
[01:28:39]  And that's not to justify in any way China's treatment of the Uyghurs, but maybe if someone's listening who wants to explore this more, this topic, it's a topic that I really never got the chance to research.
[01:28:49]  But I also knew there's another data point in my brain that a lot of the so-called internment camps where China was doing its, first they said it was a genocide, and then later they dialed back those claims to it's a cultural genocide.
[01:29:04]  Well, partly they're doing that these internment camps.
[01:29:07]  And I knew I had seen online one of these famous photos of a bunch of guys like kneeling in blue jumpsuits.
[01:29:13]  And someone had applied a corrective to that, translated like the Chinese script that was in that photo and said, this is a drug rehabilitation center.
[01:29:22]  And a lot of the supposed repression of the Uyghurs had to do with forced drug rehabilitation.
[01:29:30]  And I don't know how to not connect that to all the stuff that we've been talking about in Afghanistan.
[01:29:34]  But like I said, I'll leave it at that because I really don't know too much more.
[01:29:38]  You know, one thing I've always found interesting is that in the 1980s, you know, China participated in the U.S. war on the on the Soviets in or the U.S. Mujahideen war on the Soviets in Afghanistan.
[01:29:56]  They sent weapons.
[01:29:57]  They trained Mujahideen in Xinjiang.
[01:30:01]  And they, you know, they sent Uyghurs over there to go fight.
[01:30:06]  And so it's sort of, there's some interesting parallels.
[01:30:09]  I've always been like, this is probably guys should not have done that.
[01:30:14]  And blowback season seven about Uyghurs being sent over to fucking to Afghanistan.
[01:30:23]  But yeah, I mean, it does seem like I think, I mean, one of the, one of the things that you read in U.S. reporting on China's like business deals in Afghanistan post-U.S. withdrawal is like, well, they're there to keep an eye on the Uyghurs.
[01:30:36]  I'm like, are they?
[01:30:37]  I mean, are you doing a mine to keep an eye on the Uyghurs?
[01:30:40]  Like, I'm not really sure that's are they all about the people.
[01:30:42]  Also, I love keep an eye on them.
[01:30:44]  Keep an eye on them.
[01:30:45]  What are you doing?
[01:30:46]  Do you need to do that with like a diplomatic?
[01:30:48]  I mean, I guess you, I don't know.
[01:30:51]  It seems a little ridiculous.
[01:30:53]  But I want to switch tact real quick before we wrap up to another place, which we've touched on a little bit in this episode, but I think I want to get your take on this.

=== Going to War with Cartels? (07:29) ===

[01:31:05]  Trump land has been talking for quite a while about deploying special forces troops to fight the cartels down south in Mexico way.
[01:31:23]  Should we do that?
[01:31:24]  Do you think that's a good idea?
[01:31:27]  Talk about it or actually invade Mexico.
[01:31:29]  No, no, should we invade Mexico?
[01:31:30]  Should we invade the country?
[01:31:32]  I like it, David.
[01:31:32]  You're saying sure.
[01:31:34]  Sure, why not?
[01:31:37]  I don't think that would turn out well for anybody.
[01:31:42]  I also don't think it will happen.
[01:31:44]  You know, that's what I was saying before about the Afghan national government being the biggest drug cartel in world history, about that not being a metaphor, because it was a very organized and identifiable system.
[01:31:56]  Contrast that with drug trafficking organizations in Mexico, which are extremely opaque.
[01:32:02]  I don't know where the U.S. would start.
[01:32:05]  And when they say that they want to go to war with cartels, well, who do they mean?
[01:32:10]  Do they mean the mafias that are down on the other side of the border in South Texas?
[01:32:15]  Do they mean whatever the hell is going on in Sinaloa?
[01:32:18]  Or do they mean the elements of the Mexican military and government that are involved in drug trafficking?
[01:32:25]  But just like in Afghanistan, the whole history of the drug trade in Mexico is inseparable from U.S. intervention.
[01:32:34]  Mexico's cartel system, the original Guadalajara cartel, was created by the Mexican DFS, its Department of Federal Security, which was a CIA proxy that was waging a dirty war against leftists all over.
[01:32:49]  It was part of the dirty war that was waging war on leftists all throughout Central America and was part of the effort to support the Contras in the war against the Sandinistas.
[01:33:00]  There's a guy, an important figure in Mexican history named Miguel Nazar Haro, who was the head of the DFS during the 1980s.
[01:33:09]  And he's the guy who literally, he was the CIA's top asset in Mexico.
[01:33:15]  And he was the guy who literally arranged the Guadalajara cartel.
[01:33:20]  He brought together all these traffickers who had been competing and got them to centralize prices and geographically separate their various domains and funnel everything through his agency.
[01:33:35]  That cartel ended up breaking up after the Cold War ended into the Sinaloa cartel, the Guadalajara cartel, and the Tijuana cartel, including the Sinaloa under El Chapo Guzman.
[01:33:47]  He was a protege of Felix Gallardo, who was funneling guns and also money to the Contras.
[01:33:56]  So all of this has the fingerprints of U.S. intervention and the Mexican deep state, U.S.-backed Mexican deep state all over it.
[01:34:04]  The other big cartel, Los Zetas, developed from a Green Beret attempt to create like a U.S.-backed attempt to create a sort of Mexican Green Beret.
[01:34:16]  Guys that were trained at Fort Benning at the School of the Americas went back to Mexico and became the Los Zetas cartel.
[01:34:23]  Incidentally, Miguel Nazar Haro was trained in counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg.
[01:34:30]  But all of that is to say, like, when the U.S. says that they're going to go to war with the cartels in Mexico, well, I don't know how to respond to that because I don't know who they mean.
[01:34:38]  They're going to have to be more specific, like narrow it down to a region or talk about, because to such a large extent, the cartels are either completely unorganized.
[01:34:49]  It's just groups of traffickers sometimes work together, sometimes don't, sometimes compete, sometimes kill each other, sometimes cooperate.
[01:34:58]  And then there's more substantial involvement and more high level control over all of this, including things like more like taxation of drug flows that are taking place within the Mexican security services that are backed by the State Department, CIA, and the military.
[01:35:13]  So to go to war with the traffickers, and what's really scary when you look at the composition of the new Trump administration is you realize that a lot of the stuff that starts out as propaganda, it starts out as psyops, it gets sort of recycled or taken back up into the system somehow to where the people start actually believing this shit.
[01:35:34]  Yeah.
[01:35:35]  And you start to wonder, like, did Trump's top guys actually think that there's a cartel in Mexico that they can go and fight a war with?
[01:35:43]  I don't know.
[01:35:44]  It's interesting Because I feel like one of the things that we saw with the first Trump admin and then just sort of looking at the way they are, or some of the people that are kind of like more of the like legal and political minds within the administration,
[01:36:00]  like how they approach things, is that they seem really intent on finding and exploiting whatever like legal and bureaucratic rules already exist that they can then use to do whatever it is that they want to do, regardless of whether or not, like, I wouldn't, I wonder if they're like, if there's people in there who are like, we need to go to war with Mexico, like as a grand idea of going to war with Mexico, or if they're like, well,
[01:36:28]  all of these sort of legal justifications exist from the groundwork laid by the war on drugs, from the groundwork laid by the war on terror, that we can sort of combine to justify strategic interventions and drone strikes and other sorts of hyper-militarization of the border that in any kind of like in any way that you and I embrace or anyone would look at it would be like,
[01:36:58]  damn, that's basically an intervention in Mexico, but it's not, doesn't like actually come out as now we are invading Mexico, right?
[01:37:06]  Like designating the cartels as terrorist organizations or whatever, which I mean, I think is certainly like a possibility.
[01:37:17]  And all of these guys, you know, like Kash Patel and all of these guys who are going to get high up point posts in the administration have already like come out and, you know, said that they want to do all of that and all those things.
[01:37:30]  Like that enables whatever actors that I do agree, like whether or not, I don't know if they're like cynical or if they believe this stuff or what, but to just sort of like do crazy shit that they want to do because they have now the full force of the state to do it.
[01:37:50]  Well, in order to do even limited type of interventions like drone strikes and night raids, which is just a euphemism for assassinations.
[01:38:00]  The whole second decade of the war in Afghanistan was prosecuted entirely through those two tactics.
[01:38:06]  If they were actually going to do that in Mexico, they would have to develop targets.
[01:38:11]  They wouldn't be able to actually do operations without targets.
[01:38:15]  And I don't think they have those.
[01:38:18]  And if they had bad targets, which they could get away with in countries like Afghanistan or elsewhere, they wouldn't be able to in Afghanistan.
[01:38:26]  They would drone strike somebody in Miguel Aleman or in, I don't know, Reynosa or somewhere on the other side of the border.

=== Fighting in Mexico (02:55) ===

[01:38:35]  And it would immediately come out.
[01:38:36]  You see like a hundred Facebook photos of him.
[01:38:38]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:38:39]  Like he's like, turns out to be like a local preacher or something and ran like a cat rescue shelter or something.
[01:38:44]  Or someone in McAllen would say, oh, that was my uncle.
[01:38:47]  Like, here's five pictures of him.
[01:38:49]  You know, they wouldn't be able to hoodwink people.
[01:38:52]  Like, it would be clear that they were just striking random innocent people, which, you know, they were doing that for years and years in Afghanistan.
[01:38:59]  But there's such an alien and distant culture with so many barriers of language that we were never really able to get the full picture on it in a way that they would in Mexico.
[01:39:09]  So for that reason, I'm really skeptical that they're actually going to do anything.
[01:39:13]  And I hope I'm right about that because it would be really sad.
[01:39:15]  Yeah, me too.
[01:39:16]  I hope you are right.
[01:39:17]  They actually, yeah.
[01:39:19]  Well, we got to wrap up.
[01:39:21]  Seth, do you have any last words?
[01:39:26]  No, thanks.
[01:39:27]  Thanks for having me on.
[01:39:28]  It's good to talk to you guys.
[01:39:30]  We love to have your fucking ass on.
[01:39:32]  You know, you're going to be back next year when the book comes out.
[01:39:34]  Please, please come on our show when the book comes out.
[01:39:38]  Yeah, that'd be great.
[01:39:39]  Well, I have to because the book wouldn't have existed without y'all's show.
[01:39:43]  Fuck up.
[01:39:44]  No, really.
[01:39:45]  I was talking about Ukraine a couple times back, and my editor of Viking, Allison Lawrenson, who's a fan of y'all's show, as I think a lot of people in the publishing industry are.
[01:39:58]  And just heard me mention a few things about Fort Bragg, and she got in touch.
[01:40:01]  And that's how the book came together.
[01:40:04]  So I definitely owe it to y'all.
[01:40:05]  Christ.
[01:40:06]  Insane.
[01:40:07]  That's crazy.
[01:40:08]  Well, if publishers are listening, get in contact with me because I want to publish my memoirs.
[01:40:13]  Liz is 101.
[01:40:15]  Yeah, Chicken Soup for the Soul by Liz is the working title.
[01:40:21]  They're going to bring those back.
[01:40:22]  That book that Seth mentions and that we mentioned is the Fort Bragg Cartel coming July 2025.
[01:40:30]  And yeah, it's a pleasure to have you on, brother.
[01:40:34]  Thanks for having me.
[01:40:35]  It's always a pleasure.
[01:40:47]  I want to say real quick before we end, I know that someone's going to be like, well, I got China White in fucking Fresno in 2009.
[01:40:55]  I understand that.
[01:40:56]  I'm talking about my lived experience.
[01:40:58]  And that is, I don't know.
[01:40:59]  Standpoint, baby.
[01:41:00]  Standpoint.
[01:41:01]  You're a liberal now.
[01:41:02]  You love it.
[01:41:02]  A Turk and Taylor.
[01:41:03]  And when I was standing at that point, I was like, it's all tar from here.
[01:41:08]  It's so gross.
[01:41:10]  Tar.
[01:41:10]  It gets very sticky.
[01:41:12]  But it smells like coffee.
[01:41:15]  Espresso beans being roasted.
[01:41:18]  But it's bad for you.
[01:41:20]  I'm Liz.
[01:41:22]  My name is Grace.
[01:41:24]  And we are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:41:28]  And this has been TrueNON.
[01:41:29]  We'll see you next time.