I am sure a little research you could find the articles , unless they have been totally scrubbed , which was going on alot in those days!
from my files:
WALL STREET JOURNAL SAYS BUSH,SR/B.LADENS CRONIES (views: 280)
PuzzlePieces -- Friday, 28 September 2001, 10:55 p.m.
12-Feb-01: Carlucci, Baker, Soros in Carlyle Group (views: 146)
hobie -- Friday, 28 September 2001, 11:38 p.m.
Re: WALL STREET JOURNAL SAYS BUSH,SR/B.LADENS CRON (views: 172)
Phoenix -- Saturday, 29 September 2001, 12:38 a.m.
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How Washington Funded the Taliban
by Ted Galen Carpenter
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id... Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and is the author or editor of 14 books on international affairs including the forthcoming "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America" (Palgrave/ St. Martin's).
Added to cato.org on August 2, 2002
This article appeared on cato.org on August 2, 2002.
The United States has made common cause with an assortment of dubious regimes around the world to wage the war on drugs. Perhaps the most shocking example was Washington's decision in May 2001 to financially reward Afghanistan's infamous Taliban government for its edict ordering a halt to the cultivation of opium poppies.
When the Taliban implemented a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001, U.S. officials were most complimentary. James P. Callahan, director of Asian Affairs for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, uncritically relayed the alleged accounts of Afghan farmers that "the Taliban used a system of consensus-building" to develop and carry out the edict. That characterization was more than a little suspect because the Taliban was not known for pursuing consensus in other aspects of its rule. Columnist Robert Scheer was justifiably scathing in his criticism of the U.S. response. "That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising," Sheer noted, but he considered it "grotesque" for a U.S. official to describe the drug-crop crackdown in such benign terms.
Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban's proclaimed ban of opium cultivation.
In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. Given Callahan's comment, there was little doubt that the new stipend was a reward for Kabul's anti-drug efforts. That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan's estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan's theocratic masters. Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and is the author or editor of 14 books on international affairs including the forthcoming "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America" (Palgrave/ St. Martin's).
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More by Ted Galen Carpenter
To make matters worse, U.S. officials were naive to take the Taliban edict at face value. The much-touted crackdown on opium poppy cultivation appears to have been little more than an illusion. Despite U.S. and UN reports that the Taliban had virtually wiped out the poppy crop in 2000-2001, authorities in neighboring Tajikistan reported that the amounts coming across the border were actually increasing. In reality, the Taliban gave its order to halt cultivation merely to drive up the price of opium the regime had already stockpiled.
