The New York Times published an insightful piece on the state of the war in Afghanistan on today’s front page. In short: Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother to Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been made an honorary member of the world’s most coveted and notorious V.I.P. list: the C.I.A. payroll! While the announcement may come as a shock to some, the fact that Mr. Karzai has been in bed with the C.I.A. for the past eight years is the undeniable reality of the struggling and troubled American-Afghan alliance.

Anyone keeping up with the complete timeline of the “greater” Afghanistan war has to love the irony of the twisted course of events. Here you have the President’s brother working directly with the C.I.A. and making some big bucks in their efforts to stabilize the country. At the same time, this self-same individual serves as the foremost figure behind the world’s largest opium market. When asked about his involvement in the Afghan drug trade, he denied the allegations and during the same interview, denied working directly with the C.I.A.

Reading the words “stability,” “drug trade” and “drug traffickers” scattered throughout the body of the article brought to mind the C.I.A.’s heavy influence in Latin America and its direct involvement with the region’s “stability,” “drug markets” and “drug traffickers” amid rampant corruption in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. A perfect parallel to the Afghan experiment can be found in Panama. It’s the early 1980’s and Colonel Manuel Noriega, the C.I.A.’s primary contact in Panama, rises to power. Noriega served as head of Panama’s military intelligence and had a long standing relationship with the C.I.A.’s payroll since the 1960’s. In 1976, George H.W. Bush became C.I.A. director under President Ford and inherited Noriega as a contact. Despite evidence that Noriega was involved in drug trafficking, Bush kept Noriega on the C.I.A. payroll, bumped his salary to roughly $100,000 a year and eliminated the requirement that intelligence reports about Panama include information on drug trafficking. In 1981, when Mr. Bush became Vice President to President Reagan, he took personal responsibility for monitoring Noriega’s intelligence activities and saw to it that Noriega had everything he needed to be a strong localized ally of the United States.

With the Cold War at its peak and threatening to open a new front in Central America at the onset of the Reagan Administration, Noriega served as the C.I.A.’s main man in the region. In 1983, he began working closely with the C.I.A. and Israeli arms dealers to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua through arm-supply networks which provided weapons to Contra bases in Northern Costa Rica. Declassified documents now tell us that the planes used to carry these American and Israeli arms into Costa Rica were also used to carry drugs smuggled from South America into the U.S. by way of Mexico. The incredible (and continued) amounts of U.S. taxpayer money gave Noriega the assurance that the U.S. would turn a blind eye to his continued brokering of cocaine deals in return for using his arms network to adequately arm the Contras in Northern Costa Rica. In other words, the C.I.A. didn’t really care about Noriega’s drug smuggling and other illegal activities, because in the end, Noriega was a means to a greater end, namely the eradication of Communism.

When taking a deeper introspection into the lives of these men and their ties to the C.I.A., it becomes crystal clear as to why the C.I.A. would become the most prominent defenders of men like Noriega, Karzai or any other chief C.I.A. client/contact in any region of the world where it operates. I encourage everyone to take a closer look into Panama, into Bolivia, into Vietnam, into Honduras, into Argentina, into Chile, into Thailand, into Burma and now, into Afghanistan. The fact is that the C.I.A wants, no, they need these men to be there, because if not them, then who?

Time has shown over and over again, in almost perfect cyclical repetition of the same scenario, that when the C.I.A. helps, trains, supports and/or installs strong men in any part of the third world, because they want these men to be strong and militarily prominent, the C.I.A. wants to see them involved with the strongest local economic forces which time and time again, have proven to be the drug markets. Thus, the fact that these individuals are involved in drug trafficking is quite normal, because the main constant in the experiment is that drug trafficking is the sort of thing C.I.A. clients tend to do.

In the end, I can’t say that I know 100% what the outcome in Afghanistan will be, but if the C.I.A.’s there, you know it can’t be too positive, namely because it has not been all that positive in trials past. The sad reality is that the trials and testing grounds have now shifted over to the Middle East and Central Asia. I just hope that Mr. Karzai knows what he got himself into, because frankly Ahmed, there’s no way out of this one!

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1. Afghanistan Needs a Karl Rove: The Plan to Bushize Karzai
2. America’s Other Imperial Project: My Appeasement Manifesto
3. Awkwardness in Arabic Class IV
4. What Solidarity Color Does Afghan Election Fraud Get?
5. A Relationship Built on Trust