Since 2006, on a conservative estimate, it has cost £15m a day to maintain Britain's military presence in Helmand province. The equivalent of £25,000 will have been spent for every one of Helmand's 1.5 million inhabitants, more than most of them will earn in a lifetime, it says.
By 2020, the author of a new book says, Britain will have spent at least £40bn on its Afghan campaign, enough to recruit over 5,000 police officers or nurses and pay for them throughout their careers. It could fund free tuition for all students in British higher education for 10 years.
Alternatively, the sum would be enough to equip the navy with an up-to-date aircraft carrier group, or recruit and equip three army or Royal Marine brigades and fund them for 10 years.
In the first full attempted audit of what he calls Britain's "last imperial war", Frank Ledwidge, author of Investment in Blood, published next week by Yale University Press, estimates British troops in Helmand have killed at least 500 non-combatants. About half of these have been officially admitted and Britain has paid compensation to the victims' families.
Comment: Erm, try at least 20,000 non-combatants...
The rest are based on estimates from UN and NGO reports, and "collateral damage" from air strikes and gun battles.
Ledwidge includes the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops wounded in the conflict and for more than 5,000 he calls "psychologically injured". Around 444 British soldiers have been killed in the Afghan conflict, according to the latest official MoD figures.
The MoD has estimated the cost so far of conducting military operations in Afghanistan to be about £25bn. MoD officials said on Wednesday that British troops were in Helmand to protect British national security by helping Afghans build up their own security forces.
The ministry does not keep figures on civilian casualties and has told the Commons defence committee that it cannot provide a figure for the "total" cost of operations in Afghanistan.
Ledwidge, who has also been a civilian adviser to the British government in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, says Helmand is no more stable now than when thousands of British troops were deployed there in 2006. Opium production that fell under the Taliban, is increasing, fuelling corruption and the coffers of warlords.
"Rendering the Afghan armed forces capable of securing the province [Helmand] is regarded by many ordinary British soldiers as little short of ridiculous," Ledwidge writes.
Though British and other foreign troops were sent to Afghanistan to stop al-Qaida posing a threat to Britain's national security, "of all the thousands of civilians and combatants, not a single al-Qaida operative or 'international terrorist' who could conceivably have threatened the United Kingdom is recorded as having been killed by Nato forces in Helmand," Ledwidge writes.
The real beneficiaries of the war, he suggests, are development consultants, Afghan drug lords, and international arms companies. Much of British aid to Afghanistan is spent on consultancy fees rather than those Afghans who need it most.
It was a serious mistake, the author adds, to treat al-Qaida as a military problem - the problem was primarily an intelligence one. Reflecting the widespread view across Whitehall and among defence chiefs, he says the real reason Britain has expended so much blood and money on Afghanistan is simple: "The perceived necessity of retaining the closest possible links with the US."
Ledwidge told the Guardian: "Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand - to which Britain claimed it would bring 'good governance' - will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies."
Comment: Uhm, that's exactly what Britain has transformed Afghanistan back into...
Unsung heroin: How MI6, CIA spend tax money on propping up Afghan drug trade
He added: "There are no new lessons here, only one rather important old precept: before you engage in a war, understand the environment you are going into, precisely and realistically what it is you are trying to achieve and will it be worth the cost? In other words have a strategy."
Concerning Great Britain's reasons (the foremost among them being not only being sheer greed, but also manipulation, subjugation, and domination of the world's masses) for its lengthy and continuing history of involvement in the drug trade, Dr. John Coleman wrote, in his extremely interesting 1991 book "The Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Committee of 300":
'To them [the elitist criminals in the "Committee of 300, "ordinary" people are there to be used for their purposes. Their high-priests, Bulwer-Lytton and Aldous Huxley, preached the gospel of drugs as a beneficial substance. To quote Huxley:
"And for private everyday use, there have always been chemical
intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all
the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in
berries, have been used by humans since time immemorial.
And to these modifiers of conscience, modern science has
added its quota of synthetics. For unrestricted use the West
has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All other chemical
Doors in the Wall are labeled DOPE."
To the oligarches and plutocrats of the Committee of 300, drugs have a two-fold purpose, firstly to bring in colossal sums of money and
secondly, to eventually turn a major part of the population into mindless drug zombies who will be easier to control than people who don't need drugs, as punishment for rebellion will mean withholding of supplies of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, etc. For this it is necessary to legalize drugs so that a MONOPOLY SYSTEM, which has been readied for introduction
once severe economic conditions, of which the 1991 depression is
the forerunner, cause drug usage to proliferate as hundreds of thousands of permanently jobless workers turn to drugs for solace.
In one of the Royal Institute of International Affairs [RIAA] top secret papers, the scenario is laid out as follows (in part):
"...having been failed by Christianity, and with unemployment
on every hand, those who have been without jobs for five years
or more will turn away from the church and seek solace in drugs.
That is when full control of the drug trade must be completed
in order that the governments of all countries who are under
our jurisdiction will have a MONOPOLY which we will control
through supply.... Drug bars will take care of the unruly and the
discontent, would be revolutionaries will be turned into
harmless addicts with no will of their own...."
There is ample evidence that the CIA and British intelligence,
specially M16, have already spent at least a decade working toward
this goal.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs used the lifetime work of Aldous Huxley and Bulwer-Lytton as its blueprint to bring about a state where mankind will no longer have wills of their own in the One World Government-New World Order of the fast-approaching New Dark Age.
Again, let us see what high priest Aldous Huxley had to say about this:
"In many societies at many levels of civilization, attempts
have been made to fuse drug intoxication with God intoxication.
In ancient Greece, for example, ethyl alcohol had its place in the
established religions. Dionysus, Bacchus, as he was often called,
was a true divinity. Complete prohibition of chemical changes can
be decreed but cannot be enforced. (THE LANGUAGE OF THE
PRO-DRUG LOBBY ON CAPITOL HILL.)
"Now let us consider another type of drug—still undiscovered, but
probably just around the corner—a drug making people happy in
situations where they would normally feel miserable. (Is there
anyone more miserable than a person who has sought and been
unable to find work?) Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing
fraught with grave social and political dangers. By making a harmless
chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator (read Committee of
300) could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which
self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled."
Quite a dialectical masterpiece. What Huxley was advocating and which is official policy of the Committee of 300 and its surrogate, RIIA, can be quite simply stated as mass mind control. As I have often said, all wars are wars for the souls of mankind. Thus far it has not dawned on us that the drug trade is irregular low-intensity warfare against the whole human race of free men. Irregular warfare is the most terrible form of warfare
which, while it has a beginning, has no ending.
Some will question the involvement of the British royal families, past and present, in the drug trade. To see it in print appears on the surface to be preposterous, and it is being seen in print more often these days to make it appear exactly that, preposterous. The oldest maxim in the intelligence business is, "If you want to hide something, put it where everyone can see it."'
Likewise, concerning US involvement:
'The Eastern Liberal Establishment families of the United States were just as deeply involved in the China opium trade as were the British, indeed they still are. Witness recent history when James Earl Carter toppled the Shah of Iran. Why was the Shah deposed and then murdered by the United States government? In a word, because of DRUGS. The Shah had clamped down and virtually put an end to the immensely lucrative opium trade being conducted out of Iran by the British. At the time that the Shah took over in Iran, there were already one million opium/heroin addicts.
This the British would not tolerate, so they sent the United States to do their dirty work for them in terms of the "special relationship" between the two countries. When Khomeini took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, arms sales by the United States, which had begun with the Shah, were not discontinued. Why not? Had the United States done so, Khomeini would have canceled the British monopoly of the opium trade in his country. To prove the point, after 1984, Khomeini's liberal attitude toward opium had increased the number of addicts to 2 million, according to United Nations and World Health Organization statistics.
Both President Carter and his successor, Ronald Reagan, willingly and with full knowledge of what was at stake, went on supplying arms to Iran even while American hostages languished in captivity. In 1980 I wrote a monograph under the title, "What Really Happened in Iran," which set out the facts. The arms trade with Iran was sealed at a meeting between Cyrus Vance, a servant of the Committee of 300, and Dr. Hashemi, which resulted in the U.S. Air Force beginning an immediate airlift of arms to Iran, carried on even at the height of the hostage crisis the arms came from U.S. Army stockpiles in Germany and some were even flown
directly from the United States with refueling stops at the Azores.
With the advent of Khomeini, who was put in power in Iran by the Committee of 300, opium production skyrocketed. By 1984 Iran's opium production exceeded 650 metric tons of opium per annum. What Carter and Reagan did was ensure that there was no further interference in the opium trade and they carried out the mandate given to them by the oligarchical families in Britain in this connection. Iran presently rivals the Golden Triangle in the volume of opium produced.'
Thus, from a previous MI-6 operative's perspective, not only does Dr. Coleman provide us with a "peek behind the curtain" view of the West's interests in and reasons behind war provocation with Iran (oil, opium/heroin production + other resources like gold reserves?), but we can probably glean a clearer picture of how the Judeo-Christian vs. Islam religious angle can be and actually is used to muddy the waters, so to speak, so that confusion is cast upon the minds of those seeking objectivity.
Specifically, in a chicken / egg line of questioning (which came first, the chicken or the egg?), is Israel and its Zionist supporters using the UK and US to further its own aims at the expense of their "allies," or vice versa? Or, moreover, knowing that we already do, in fact, have a one world government in existence, does it even make sense to give this question any weight?
Regardless, we do know there are some pretty big dramas taking place in the world today, at the expense of the global mass populace, but the question of how much is diversionary (cover ops) and how much is genuine contention between / amongst factions, is one to be continuously scrutinized and probed for cracks/breaks (revelations) so that objective knowledge can be enhanced and shared for the STO-oriented benefit of the group...
~ RJ Collings