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NATO commander: Afghanistan drug raids imminent

"You need to read the news papers of talaban era when drugs were at lowest level."

The taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996. Opium production that year was 2200 metric tons. 1997-2800 metric tons; 1998-2700 metric tons; 1999- 4600 metric tons; 2000- 3300 metric tons.

UNODC Afghanistan 2004 Report Page 4.

Your information is wrong. The taliban only undertook the eradication of opium when the isolation of their regime became painfully apparent. Opium was a sure and certain source of income for the taliban and little explains the rapid jump in 1999 except the need to for hard cash by their government.

They've been knee-deep in the opium trade from the beginning. It was a huge part of their economy Don't fool yourself. The numbers don't lie.
The report you want us to read is old. Here is the link to the most recent 2008 report http://www.unodc.org/documents/publications/Afghanistan_Opium_Survey_2008.pdf. And for your and your indian supporter's convenience, I am posting some figures taken from page 3 and 9 respectively. Which indeed prove that opium production in Afghanistan has boosted under US occupation. Dont fool people with half baked facts. But well, typical of you guys, spreading disinformation.
 
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"Dont fool people with half baked facts. But well, typical of you guys, spreading disinformation."

Strawman argument. Stop it. Your figures aren't disputed. Neither are they relevant to my point with waraich66. You see his comment. You see my response. There's no argument that opium production is unprecedented in Afghanistan now.

So? That's not what waraich66 was discussing, was it? Try reading his comments and using my resource. Do you dispute UNODC's numbers for 1997-1999?

If not, butt out of the conversation as you've added nothing of value.
 
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I will thank you for the graphs though. Illuminating, wouldn't you agree? What we can clearly see is that it took until 2006 for opium production in Afghanistan to exceed the 1999 mark set three years into the taliban regime in Afghanistan. At no time between 2002-2005 did opium production exceed levels reached in 1999 under the taliban government.

2006 is an interesting year. It coincides PERFECTLY with the resurgence of the militant insurgency. Opium continues to remain most firmly embedded today in those areas with the greatest taliban control. Helmand is certainly in dispute generally. South of Garmsir, where opium production is unprecedented, it's FULLY under control of the militants.

The fact is that opium has always been a key component of the militants' financing and remains so.
 
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The fact is that opium has always been a key component of the militants' financing and remains so.
It still is, specially when the cash strapped US desperately needs a 'resource' to support its expensive operations in Afghanistan. There is a reason why opium production has gone to its present levels right under the nose of the US/NATO.

If US/NATO were ever interested in addressing the problem, we should have seen a drop in the opium production once Afghanistan was captured by the US/NATO. It didn't happen, what happened was opium production soared. Right there it tells what happened. There were all kinds of technologies at the disposal of the occupying forces to locate, and destroy the crops. If you have no hasitation to drop tons of TNT on the innocent civilians, what stopped you to use the same TNT to destroy the poppy fields? Even your argument that Taliban are using poppy crop to finance their insurgency or terrorism what ever, holds no water. 'Fully under control' on the ground. What about the air? now dont tell me that Taliban have S400s to deter your bombers. Just go ahead and destroy the fields which are in Afghanistan not on the Mars. Unless the beneficiary is not the Taliban but the corrupt Afghan government and its supporters.
 
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No. The facts provided by you are clear. The problem is decreasing everywhere the taliban isn't strong and some of the places where they do have strength.

Note the figures for the eastern provinces under U.S. control-Nuristan, Nangahar, Konar, Paktia, etc. The cultivated hectares have fallen off the roof since 2004. Over 28,000 hectares in 2004 in Nangahar. None today. Zero.

The problem is two-fold. Helmand, Oruzgan, and Kandahar show the most resilience. These are the three areas most affected by the insurgency and where the Canadians, Dutch, and British control operations, to include narcotics control.

It's a troop numbers problem in the south and that will start to change. What won't is, despite likely drug control improvement, the problem. There's a backlog of inventory that will allow the militants price leverage for some time even as production descends.

The problem isn't American. That's clear from the data you've provided if you were smart enough to read and understand what you were seeing.

Keep watching there, smart guy. Yup.:agree:
 
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The problem is two-fold. Helmand, Oruzgan, and Kandahar show the most resilience. These are the three areas most affected by the insurgency and where the Canadians, Dutch, and British control operations, to include narcotics control.

It's a troop numbers problem in the south and that will start to change. What won't is, despite likely drug control improvement, the problem. There's a backlog of inventory that will allow the militants price leverage for some time even as production descends.
I am posting the following again. Looks like you didn't bother to read. 'Fully under control' on the ground. What about the air? now dont tell me that Taliban have S400s to deter your bombers. Send in the B-52s with napalm and incinirate the fields. Why not?
 
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"Send in the B-57s with napalm and incinirate the fields. Why not?"

B-57s, eh? Sorta long, long gone from our inventory. Nonetheless, I get your drift. Stupid idea actually.

British and Afghan problem. Not our turf...yet and not the way we'd likely do it anyway.

We've burned some fields- but not many. It takes a combination of approaches and your 2008 report talks about some of them. So far it's working for us and others. Maybe the British, Dutch, and Canadians will try some of our techniques. Maybe not.

We'll see.
 
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"Send in the B-57s with napalm and incinirate the fields. Why not?"

B-57s, eh? Sorta long, long gone from our inventory. Nonetheless, I get your drift. Stupid idea actually.

British and Afghan problem. Not our turf...yet and not the way we'd likely do it anyway.

We've burned some fields- but not many. It takes a combination of approaches and your 2008 report talks about some of them. So far it's working for us and others. Maybe the British, Dutch, and Canadians will try some of our techniques. Maybe not.

We'll see.
Typo error, I meant B-52. At any rate, stupid idea indeed. You'll lose a big source of cash if this is put to work. Boy you are a big time rantoo. Now all of a sudden this has become a British and Afghan problem? You started it all and now want Brits, Dutch, Canadians to clean up your mess. No wonder why these countries are pulling out their troops and minimizing their support for your novel cause.
 
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"You started it all..."

Actually some irhabist murderous fcuks who remind me suspiciously of you did on 9/11. Their asinine village idiot one-eyed goat screwing mullah and HIS crew abetted them. Now they all live courtesy of hidden hands in Pakistan.

"You'll lose a big source of cash if this is put to work."

Silly us. We've already done so in Nangahar, Nuristan, et al. Thanks for the report. Couldn't spell more clearly the functional, on the ground difference between our approach and those of our allies.

Our's works. Zero is tough to beat. So you try to deflect the argument back to an "our fault for airplanes crashing into buildings".

And that's where we happily part ways. You've no explanation for the convergence of testimony, confessions, freely offered public admissions, nor physical evidence that point to the planning, preparation, and execution of these attacks.

Nothing about our actions in attacking Afghanistan were illegal. Nothing about our participation in the U.N. mission since the Bonn Accords are illegal. Nothing we've done to the afghan citizens since 2001 equals 1.) the insurgents own actions, 2.) the afghan civil war, nor 3.) the Afghan-Soviet war. The differences in lives lost isn't even remotely comparable.

No qsaark. Afghanistan has never held in it's history a better chance to emerge as a viable modern nation. No combination of nations can be accused of having the wrong interests at heart. Were it not for the militant insurgency, there'd likely be far greater progress made despite bureaucratic ineptitude by the U.N./ISAF and corruption/crime in the Afghan government. Those are reasonable postulates of alternatives had the Pakistani government not afforded safe haven to a considerable number of taliban army and al Qaeda fighters/leaders.

Because the GoP did, we've an insurgency in two nations and must accept the taliban's determination to use opium to corrode the Afghan goverment. It's now apparent that any gains between 2002-2006 were illusory so long as the insurgency could lie safely dormant in Pashtunistan gathering it's strength.

Only beginning in 2006 did opium production exceed the 1999 world record highs set by the old taliban regime. The correlation to the militants resurgent attacks on Afghanistan is undeniably obvious. Only in those regions strongly influenced by the taliban today doesn this condition still persist to destabilizing levels. Elsewhere within Afghanistan the trend lines are clearly down by your own 2008 UNODC report.

Thanks again for it's invaluable assistance proving my points.
 
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Dont try to plant mango tree in Gilgit

Ok pay that one.. :rofl:

Don’t knock the idea, even if it sounds stupid.

Well the summer temperatures may be a bit low for good ripening of mangos. The winter looks a bit too cold to maintain the trees. One could try a form of hothouse particularly for the winter when it dives to the freezing levels.

How about Avocado trees? This may be more realistic. They are a bit hardier climate wise and should have a better chance of producing a good cash crop.
 
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What Are They Smoking?

The Bush war on Afghan drugs
by Ann Jones

On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush administration's Afghan War, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry that increased poppy production could be a destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in southern Afghanistan."

That rising violence – a full scale onslaught by the resurgent Taliban – put Afghanistan back in the headlines this summer and brought consternation to NATO governments (from Canada to Australia) whose soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led to believe was a peaceful "success story." Lt. Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops that took over security in embattled southern Afghanistan from the U.S. in July, warned at the time, "We could actually fail here." In October, he argued that if NATO did not bring security and significant reconstruction to the alienated Pashtun south within six months – the mission the U.S. failed to accomplish during the past five years – the majority of the populace might well switch sympathies to the Taliban.

But coming in the midst of NATO anxieties and Taliban assaults, what are we to make of Rumsfeld's "legitimate worry" about Afghan poppy production, which this year will provide 92 percent of the world's heroin supply? And what are we to make of George W. Bush's Presidential Determination, issued just before Afghan President Hamid Karzai's September visit to Washington, that the Afghan government must be "held accountable" for that poppy harvest; that it must not only "deter and eradicate poppy cultivation" in the country, but "investigate, prosecute, and extradite all the narcotraffickers" in the land?

Undeniably, the poppy trade and the resurgence of the Taliban are intimately connected, for the Taliban, who briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid, now both support and draw support from that profitable crop. Yet Western policies aimed at the Taliban and the poppy are quite separate and at odds with each other. While NATO troops scramble, between battles, to rebuild rural infrastructure, U.S. advisers urge Afghan anti-narcotics police to eradicate the livelihood of 2 million poor farmers.

So far the poppy-eradication program, largely funded by the U.S., hasn't made a dent. Last year, it claimed to have destroyed 38,000 acres of poppies, up from 12,000 the year before; but during the same period overall poppy cultivation soared from 104,000 hectares to 165,000 hectares (or 408,000 acres).

When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American occupation that followed the defeat of the Taliban, poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since – this year by 60 percent.

Still, the counterproductive eradication program succeeds in one thing. It makes life miserable for hundreds of thousands of small farmers. What happens to them? The Senlis Council, an international drug-policy think tank, reports that the drug-eradication program not only ruins small farmers but actually drives them into the arms of the Taliban who offer them loans, protection, and a chance to plant again. Big farmers, on the other hand, are undeterred by the poppy eradication program; they simply pay off the police and associated officials, spreading corruption and dashing hopes of honest government.

In 2002, President Bush announced, "We must reduce drug use for one great moral reason. When we fight against drugs, we fight for the souls of our fellow Americans." There's a profusion of ironies here. The U.S. in the 1980s fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union on Afghan soil, encouraging Islamist extremists (then "our" soldiers) and helping to set the stage for the Taliban. Now, another Republican administration sets Afghan against Afghan again in a kind of cockamamie proxy war supposedly for the souls of American heroin addicts. Since when have Republicans wanted to do anything for American drug addicts but lock them up?

This is the kind of weird "foreign policy" you get when your base is keen on the War on Drugs and there's a lot of real stuff you can't talk about outside the Oval Office – or, sometimes, in it. Like, to take an example, the way the Taliban now control the Pakistani border city of Quetta, a subject that went politely unmentioned recently when Bush entertained Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghanistan's Karzai at the White House. Like the way that Pakistan reluctantly hands over some al-Qaeda operatives to the U.S., but winks at routine Taliban cross-border traffic into Afghanistan. It also makes deals with Talibanized elders in its own tribal area of Waziristan, long thought to be a haven for al-Qaeda and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. Like the fact that no nation fights harder against the Afghan drug trade than our axis-of-evil enemy Iran, while our "staunch ally" Pakistan lends support to the trade and to the Taliban as well.

If we must worry about poppy production while all hell breaks loose in south Afghanistan and suicide bombers strike Kabul, the capital, is there a more "legitimate" or effective way to worry?

A Blooming Business

First, we can forget entirely any concern for American heroin addicts. It's been exactly 100 years since public officials first met in London to ban the international trade in opium. A century of cracking down on poppy production from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle to Central Asia's Golden Crescent to Mexico has verified one basic fact of agricultural economics. When supply is cut somewhere, another poppy-growing area quickly arises to meet the demand. Wipe out poppies in Afghanistan tomorrow and – faster than you can say "mission accomplished" – American addicts will be shooting up heroin from Pakistan or Thailand or the moon. This is a fact certain.

But none of that phony compassion for America's drug addicts factors into Rumsfeld's "legitimate worry." He's concerned about the "destabilizing" effect of the drug trade itself – on the Karzai government, Afghanistan, and the Central Asian region.

Paradoxically, many a man on the street in Kabul points to poppy as the source of jobs, wealth, hope, and such stability as President Karzai currently enjoys. Karzai himself often promises to rid government and country of drug lords, but as a Pashtun and a realist, he keeps his enemies close. His strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potential adversaries, and give them offices, often in his cabinet.

Like Musharraf in Pakistan, Karzai walks a tightrope between domestic politics and American demands for dramatic actions – such as ending the drug trade – clearly well beyond his powers. The trade penetrates even the elected parliament, which is full of the usual suspects. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) are at least 17 known drug traffickers in addition to 40 commanders of armed militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegations of war crimes and human rights violations, any or all of whom may be affiliated with the poppy business. For years, the Kabul rumor mill has traced the drug trade to the family of the president himself.

Through many administrations, the U.S. government is itself implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the CIA fostered anti-Soviet Islamist extremists, and to finance their covert operations, it fostered the drug trade as well. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced only a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army of occupation, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. As Alfred W. McCoy reports in The Politics of Heroin, Afghan mujahedeen – the guys President Ronald Reagan famously likened to "our founding fathers" – ordered Afghan farmers to grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani army transported it to Karachi for shipment overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations.

After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration made use of our old Islamist allies, paying them millions of dollars to hunt Osama bin Laden, a task to which they do not appear to have been entirely devoted. Asked in 2004 why the U.S. wasn't going after drug kingpins in Afghanistan, an unnamed U.S. official told a New York Times reporter that the drug lords were "the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001," the guys we were still relying on to get bin Laden. Interviewed by the British Independent, a U.S. soldier offered another reason: "We start taking out drug guys, and they will start taking out our guys." Reluctant to interfere with our drug-lord allies in the Global War on Terror or risk the lives of U.S. soldiers in such a dustup, the Bush administration went after small farmers instead.

Early on, the British, who were responsible for international anti-narcotics operations in Afghanistan, tried to persuade Afghan farmers to take up "alternative livelihoods" – that is, to grow other crops – even though no other crop requires less work or produces a fraction of the profits of poppy. Not that the farmers themselves get rich. Within Afghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profits may reach $3 billion this year; but international traffickers in the global marketplace will make 10 times as much, at the very least.

The small percentage of profit that stays in Afghanistan enriches mainly the kingpins: warlords, government officials, politically connected smugglers. But as drug lords build mansions in Kabul – ornate "Pakistani Palaces" of garish tile and colored glass – they create jobs and a booming trade in all sorts of legal goods from cement to pots and pans. What's more, that small in-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. It's also more than twice as much as the U.S. designated in the last five years for Afghan reconstruction, most of which never reached the country anyway.

You have to ask: what if the drug trade could be stopped? What about the destabilizing effect of that?

Fear of Flowers

As things stand, the poppy farmer makes a decent living. Poppies enable him to hold on to his scrap of land. He can feed his family and send his children to school. Nevertheless, two years ago some poppy farmers in Nangahar province were actually persuaded to give up poppy for tomatoes. They were pressured by an aggressive American campaign of defoliant aerial spraying of poppy fields that killed poppies and sickened children and livestock. The U.S. still denies responsibility for that episode and similar aerial attacks that devastated livestock in Helmand province in February 2005.

When word came that the Holy Koran had been dumped in a Guantanamo toilet, Nangahar farmers were among the furious Afghans who rioted in Jalalabad. For them, the desecration of the Koran was the last straw. They were already furious about the tomatoes. They'd harvested good crops, then watched them rot because a promised bridge they needed to get their tomatoes to market hadn't been built. Remarkably, the Nangahar farmers still gave "alternative livelihoods" one more try, but they made too little money to feed their children. This year they announced they're planting poppies again.

A field of poppies in bloom is a beautiful sight – especially in Afghanistan where the plant's brilliant greenery and its white and purplish flowers stand against a drab landscape of rock and sand, visual testimony to the promise of human endeavor even in the worst of circumstances. It may be that Afghan farmers contemplate their fields as metaphor, Afghans being great lovers of poetry. But they're practical and desperate as well, so they came up with a plan.

Afghan farmers officially proposed to British anti-narcotics officials that they be licensed to grow poppy and produce opium for state-owned refineries to be built with foreign aid donations. The refineries, in turn, would produce medicinal morphine and codeine for worldwide legal sale, thereby filling a global need for inexpensive, natural pain killers. (Recently hospitalized in the U.S., I can testify that morphine works exceedingly well, though it's expensive because, unlike heroin, it's in short supply.)

The farmers got nowhere with this proposal, although it's hard to think of any plan that could more effectively have bound the rural peasantry to Karzai's feeble central government, stabilizing and strengthening it. Now, the Senlis Council has proposed the same plan, but again it's unlikely to fly. It's not just that Big Pharma would resent the competition. Think about the Republican base, for which "legal drug" is an oxymoron.

In November 2004, in fact, George W. Bush, backed by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and powerful Republican Congressmen like Henry Hyde of Illinois, suddenly increased U.S. funds committed to the conventional Afghan war on drugs sixfold to $780 million, including $150 million designated for aerial spraying. Hyde, still on the case as chair of the House Committee on International Relations, recently suggested shifting the focus from farmers to "kingpins," but no one in the administration is ready to call off the war.

Two years ago in Kabul, I interviewed an American consultant sent by the administration to assess the "drug problem" in Afghanistan. His off-the-record verdict: "The only sensible way out is to legalize drugs. But nobody in the White House wants to hear that." He admitted that the sensible conclusion would not appear in his report.

So you see what I mean about the weird policies a government such as ours can develop when it can't talk about real facts. When it cozies up to people it professes to be against. When it attacks people whose hearts and minds it hopes to win. When it pays experts to report false conclusions it wants to hear. When it spends billions to tear down the lives of poor Afghans even as our NATO allies pray for a break in battling the Taliban so that – with time running out – they can rebuild.

Ann Jones spent the better part of the last four years in Afghanistan, working on education and women's rights – and watching. She wrote about what she saw in Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Copyright 2006 Ann Jones

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Now this is not me, this is Dr. Ann Jones an award-winning journalist and women's rights activist. A white American woman (so certain members will take her more seriously than they tend to take the 'colored or black' members) who has books like Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973), Women Who Kill (1980), Next Time, She’ll Be Dead (1994; updated edition, 2000), Kabul in Winter to her credit.

I have posted here the full article with proper reference. I am not among those who try to mislead people with half baked truths. My PhD is entirely irrelevant here, but yes, my qualifications have enabled me to think more objectively and to move in a circle of people that has ability to see a problem from more than one angle. It is now upto the readers what and how much they extract from this article.
 
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"...my qualifications have enabled me to think more objectively and to move in a circle of people that has ability to see a problem from more than one angle."

No it hasn't. It's made you myopic. You've offered a single source here that's two and one-half years old. However accurate it WAS pales to the more current and relevant evidence now available.

Trend lines are down across the board- WAY down in many cases- excepting Helmand. One read of UNODC's 2008 report tells you that, right?

Hmmm...let's see what Ms. JONES has to say-

"Undeniably, the poppy trade and the resurgence of the Taliban are intimately connected, for the Taliban, who briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid, now both support and draw support from that profitable crop."

Undeniably for sure, Ms. Jones. Then (1996-2000) and now (2002-2009). Yup. So let's continue beyond the patently obvious to her insight-

"While NATO troops scramble, between battles, to rebuild rural infrastructure, U.S. advisers urge Afghan anti-narcotics police to eradicate the livelihood of 2million poor farmers.

So far the poppy-eradication program, largely funded by the U.S., hasn't made a dent."


Is she cheering or lamenting? I can't tell.

What I can tell is two years later (2008) according to UNODC, we've areas like Nangahar and the Panjashir valley that are poppy-free. Nangahar saw it's planted hectares fall from over 28,000 to zero between 2004-2008. Oddly enough, it's those areas under U.S. control that show the greatest improvements.

I'd encourage you to read the UNODC studies more closely. I don't really care about the relevance of Ms. Jones' observations in 2006, accurate or otherwise. They bear little resemblance to the facts as they're unfolding in the fields now which you seem to either be unaware or refuse to acknowledge.

Note carefully, quoting Donald Rumsfeld or alluding to GWB probably isn't going to help your assessments of the current administration-nevermind that it's GWB's administration that can claim the reversal we're witnessing in opium.

Now for some bad news because there's plenty and I'd be remiss if I didn't include that.

Corruption continues. So do elections that, if allowed and can be conducted with some modicum of safety and fairness, offer this (and any) society a means for self-correction.

Don't like your leaders? Vote them out under the watchful eye of the U.N. NATO/ISAF and forty-one participating countries and countless global NGOs scattered about. Few locales globally appear set to offer such a publically-scrutinized election as these slated for this August in Afghanistan.

To that end, qsaark, I encourage you to travel to Afghanistan and get out the Pashtu vote. No better way to address corruption than to force politicians to pay the ultimate price. Takes time but's also the ONLY way.

Course, I guess you could just behead the worthless fcuks but then that would be kinda like...

Your taliban are knee-deep in the trade. Opium production didn't exceed the 1999 world record established by the taliban government until 2006-the year of the taliban resurgence in Afghanistan. So whatever Ms. Jones was complaining about, and it was a righteous and correct complaint, opium production at the time of her writing had still not exceeded the taliban's own dubious narcotics legacy. This is an important fact for you and others here to grasp.

That point can't be emphasized enough- the afghan taliban on both sides of the border are integral to and have benefited enormously by the opium traffiking. The huge spike that we witnessed between 2004, particularly from 2006-2008during record harvest years, was a direct function of the taliban. This remains, despite the presence of a troubling amount of donations and aid from the gulf states area, the primary source of talban disposable capital.

The taliban resistance is strongest in Helmand, particularly south of Garmsir which remains unexplored by ISAF. Guess what else remains unexplored to grow under the watchful eyes of the taliban? Yup, opium in numbers never before seen by one province-particularly, you guessed right, in those districts south of Garmsir.

"My PhD is entirely irrelevant here..."

That indeed appears so...again.
 
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there was poppy growing in FATA during the 90's. we managed to eradicate that does anybody know how we did that and if those lessons apply to the current situation in afghanisan
 
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By 1990, the planted hectares in FATA were small- about 7,000 or so. It's under a thousand now and I believe most is in Bajaur of what's left.

I've speculated that some of the rationale for their staunch defense in Bajaur by the militants was tied to this remaining (and exclusive- they see far more of the money here than simply protection) resource.

U.N. Drug Control units and DEA had a near free hand in this area during the nineties.

It's been a notable success.

I'm not sure if the heroin in labs of FATA are quite the same story.
 
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Is Afghanistan a Narco-State? by By Thomas Schweich July 27, 2008. TNY. Full report at Is Afghanistan a narco-state? - International Herald Tribune

Mr Schweich wrote: "Karzai was playing us like a fiddle. The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure development; the US and its allies would fight the Taleban; Karzai's friends could get richer off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term."



Proposed solutions:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today's high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.

3. Increase the number of DEA agents in Kabul and assist the Afghan attorney general in prosecuting key traffickers and corrupt government officials from all ethnic groups, including southern Pashtuns.

4. Get new development projects quickly to the provinces that become poppy-free or stay poppy free. The north should see significant rewards for its successful anticultivation efforts. Do not, however, provide cash to farmers for eradication.

5. Ask the allies either to help in this effort or stand down and let us do the job.

There are other initiatives that could help as well: better engagement of Afghanistan's neighbors, more drug-treatment centers in Afghanistan, stopping the flow into Afghanistan of precursor chemicals needed to make heroin and increased demand-reduction programs. But if we — the Afghans and the U.S. — do just the five items listed above, we will bring the rule of law to a lawless country; and we will cut off a key source of financing to the Taliban.

It is clear from the report that US puppet Karzai and his officials are involved in the narco business. Putting all the blame on the Taliban who are running for their lives is nothing but absolute bull...

Karzai's brother suspected of involvement in drug trade: report

Oct 4, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, may be involved in the illegal drug trade, which is prompting serious concern among top US officials, The New York Times reported on its website Saturday.

Citing unnamed US officials, the newspaper said the US ambassador to Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief and their British counterparts, discussed the allegations against Ahmed Wali Karzai with Hamid Karzai as far back as 2006.

But the Afghan president has so far resisted calls to move his brother out of the country, arguing he had not seen any conclusive evidence against Ahmed, according to the report.

"We thought the concern expressed to Karzai might be enough to get him out of there," the paper quotes one US official as saying. But "we don't have the kind of hard, direct evidence that you could take to get a criminal indictment. That allows Karzai to say, Where's your proof?'"

But indirect evidence against Ahmed Wali Karzai continues to mount, according to the report.

When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, The Times said.

Two years later, American and Afghan counternarcotics forces stopped another truck near Kabul and discovered more than 110 pounds (50 kilograms) of heroin in it.

After that seizure, the report said, US investigators discovered links between the shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai.

Both President Karzai and Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is now head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, dismiss the allegations as politically motivated attacks by longtime enemies, The Times said.
 
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