Opium Kingpin USA's Most Valuable Ally

Ho, hum, let's start out the morning with a look at the ol' front page of the New York Times. OK, here we go. So far so good, nothing to see here--OH WAIT A MINUTE! There's this!:

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

This can't possibly be the same brother of Karzai that we're always hearing about, right? The one with the drugs and the trading of the drugs? No, no, gotta be a different brother. Let's see what the Times has to say:

"Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials."

Heh. Heh. OK, then. Well, I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for this.

"The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home."

Hmmm. A CIA-backed militia operating out of Afghanistan. I feel like we've been through this before.. And what eventually happened with that? [via Wiki]

"The best-known mujahideen, various loosely-aligned Afghan opposition groups, initially fought against the incumbent pro-Soviet Afghan government during the late 1970s.
...
The mujahideen were significantly financed and armed (and are alleged to have been trained) by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Carter[5] and Reagan administrations.
...
Osama bin Laden, originally from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, was a prominent organizer and financier of an all-Arab islamist group of foreign volunteers.
...
This movement [born from the mujahideen] became known as the Taliban."

Sigh.

Here's the thing about all this. The revelation that the CIA is supporting "mafialike" warlord shouldn't surprise anyone in the least. Take a walk through the history of the CIA and you'll find a violently incompetent agency whose history consists of failure, after failure, after failure. In all honesty, the only other institutions that could continue to operate with such a dismal record are the central figures in the global economic meltdown.