And here's the reason why:

Joel Bainerman is the publisher of Inside Israel, a monthly political
intelligence report. His editorials and reports have appeared in The Wall
Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Financial Times, National
Review, New York Newsday, The San Francisco Chronical, The Baltimore Sun,
and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Bainerman, Joel, Insider the Covert Operations of the CIA & Israel's
Mossad,
(New York: SPI Books, 1994) Pp. 245-249

(excerpt beginning)

Afganistan

In May 1980 Dr. David Musto, a Yale University psychiatrist and White House
advisor on drugs, discovered that the CIA and other intelligence agencies
denied the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse he was heading acces
to all classified information on drugs. He warned then that what happened
in Laos would occur in Afganistan. Another White House Drug Council Member,
Dr. Joyce Lowinson, writing the New York Times, accurately questioned: "Are
we erring by befriending these tribes (Afganistan and Pakistan rebel
tribesmen) as we did in Laos when Air America helped transport crude opium
from certain tribal areas?

They were both right. After President Carter began shipping arms to the
mujahideen guerrillas in December 1979, drug-related deaths in New York City
rose by 77 percent (The Progressive, July 1991). By 1982, Southern Asia,
although never before a source, supplied 60 percent of the U.S. heroin
market.

University of Wisconsin professor Alfred McCoy says that during the more
than ten years of CIA covert support for the mujahideen resistance, the
Bush-Reagan Administration and the mainstream media said almost nothing
about the involvement of leading Afgan guerrillas and Pakistan military in
the heroin traffic.

McCoy tracks the relationship between the CIA and the narcotis trade in
Afganistan and Pakistan to a May 1979 meeting at Peshawar in Pakistan's
Northwest Frontier province between a CIA envoy and Afgan resistance leaders
chosen by Pakistan's ISI (Inter Service Intelligence). The ISI was said to
offer an alliance with its own Afgan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of
the small Hezbi-i Islamic group, rather than a broad spectrum of resistance
leaders (The Progressive, July 1991).

It's never been explained why, but when Reagan and Bushg took ofice
Pakistan-U.S. relations soared. More than $3 billion in U.S. aid, including
F-16 fighter jets, flowed to General Zia's army. In returnZia allowed the
CIA to open an electronic intelligence station in northern Pakistan aimed at
the Soviet Union. This enabled U.S. spy flights over the Indian Ocean from
Pakistani air bases near the Persian Gulf.

With CIA and Pakistani support, Hekmatyar became Afganistan's leading
drug trafficker. In May 1990, the Washington Post published a series of
articles explaining how the United States had ignored Afgan complaints of
heroin trafficking by Hekmatyar. The newspaper reported that Hekmatyar
commanders close to the ISI ran laboratories in southwest Pakistan and that
ISI cooperated in its heroin operations.

McCoy says that during the time the mujahideen were being supplied by the
CIA, their opium harvest doubled to 575 tons. Once these mujahideen
elements brought opium accross the border, the sold it to Pakistani heroin
refineries operating under the Pakistani government's protection (The
Progressive, July 1991).

In September 1985 the Pakistani newspaper, The Herald, reported: "The drug
is carried in National Logistics Cell [part of the Pakistani Army] trucks,
which come sealed from the Northwest Frotier and are never checked by the
police."

Drug Enforcement Agency officials admitted that the shipment of CIA
weapons into Pakistan played a key role in allowing the trade in heroin to
flourish. No heroin was refined in Pakistan before 1979 but now Pakistan
produces and exports "more heroin than the rest of the world combined," one
agent told the Philadelphia Inquirer (February 28th, 1988).

When investigative journalist Larry Lifschultz began looking into the
ties between General Zia and the Afgan drug trade, he discovered that
European and Interpol police investigations of the major heroin trafficers
had been aborted at the highest levels of the Pakistani government. The
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency itself had 17 agents working out of the U.S.
Embassy in Islamabad and compiled reports on 40 narcotics dealers in
Pakistan. Yet not a single major syndicate was investigated by Pakistani
police.

Typical of the misinformation that had blocked U.S. action against
Pakistan's heroin trade, the State Department's semi-annual narcotics review
in September 1988 called General Zia "a strong supporter of anti-narcotics
activities in Pakistan."

"Once CIA has invested its prestige in one of these opium warlords, it
cannot afford to compromise a major covert action with an investigation,"
McCoy points out. "Respecting the national security imperatives of CIA
operations, the DEA keeps its distance from agency assets, even when they
are the major drug lords" (The Progressive, July 1991).

(end excerpt)
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