Afghan drug lord extradited to US for trial

Politics and the war on some drugs blend today with this news and I have to say I'm disappointed in the WaPo for the misleading lede on this one.

A Taliban-linked man who allegedly sought to poison U.S. streets with millions of dollars of heroin in a deadly "American jihad" has become the first person extradited from Afghanistan to face federal charges, officials said Monday.

Sounds like he was planning to sell "poisoned" heroin, doesn't it? It's not until the end of the piece that this is cleared up.

According to the indictment, Mohammad told associates at his home in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1990 that selling heroin was a form of jihad, or Islamic struggle, because they were taking money from Americans while giving them something that was killing them.

U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia said drug dealers such as Mohammad seek "to destabilize Afghanistan's emerging democracy, flood the Western markets with heroin and use their profits to support the Taliban and other terrorist groups."

So in another words, he was an ordinary dealer, although perhaps a high level one for a change, who maybe was planning to ship direct to the US, although one doubts it when the traditional route goes through Russia and Europe.

As to this ridiculous contention that the guy's intent was to "destabilize Afghanistan's emerging democracy," perhaps no one told our genius AG that the economy of the entire country depends on the drug trafficking. Maybe we should reconstruct the infrastructure we destroyed - as we promised to do - so the Afghanis can form an alternate economy, before we start moralizing on the trafficking.

In any event, this is just a token bust. The heroin will still be flooding the streets of our cities, with or without this one scapegoat. And it will cost us millions of tax dollars to prosecute this case; all for some White House PR to show "progress" in "winning" their wars on drugs and terror.