Hello, this is Moderer Rebels. I'm Ben Norton. This is part two of a discussion my co-host,

Max Blumenthal and I did with the journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar. We are talking about

Afghanistan. In the first half of this, we discussed the U.S. historic defeat in Afghanistan,

the victory of the Taliban, the pullout of U.S. forces, and what that means in terms of the

geopolitics, the new Cold War on China and Russia, and the internal politics of the new

government, what it will look like, Ashrafgani, the U. of the new government, what it will look like,

Ashrafgani, the U.S. puppet president fleeing the country with $170 million and a bunch of other topics.

So definitely check out part one.

In part two here, we are going to take a step a little back and look at the regional geopolitics

involving Afghanistan, and that is pipeline conflict, natural resource conflict, and of course

opium, which is at the center of this, the CIA opium rat line. Pepe Escobar has written

quite a bit about the role of opium and heroin

production in Afghanistan, which produces over 90% of the world's illicit opium, according to the

United Nations. So we talk about that. Pepe talks about how the CIA uses heroin and opium

in general to fund its covert operations, which is exactly what

the U.S. national security state, these unaccountable spy agencies did during the Vietnam War.

The wars in Southeast Asia using heroin to fund those operations.

And Operation Phoenix, the infamous CIA terrorism program in Southeast Asia.

And then we also talked about pipeline wars.

This is so important when we're talking about Afghanistan.

We talk about the history of the conflict over the so-called TAPI

that is Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the plans for that.

...