Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?

[babsbunny]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/magazine/27AFGHAN-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

Times Topics: Opium in Afghanistan

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

[whistle]

1. I believe it is as 90+ percent of all heroin now comes from Afghanistan

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0513/p01s04-wosc.html

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9988646?source=rss

[enid602]

2. ???

Is Colombia?

[flashl]

3. Now it is ....

Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban

February 15, 2001

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

...

A State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.

...

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

[Romulox]

4. Not our job to be drug cop to the world.

The War on Drugs is pure fascism. :hi:

[Fumesucker]

5. Exactly _how_ is opium worse than alcohol? n/t

[Wiley50]

6. I've been on morphine daily since 2003. It has been a godsend.

I am physically dependent now, but not addicted. that's two separate things.

I know that if someone like me had no access to medical care, like many in our society
my only access to pain relieving narcotics would be illegal prescription meds

or street heroin.

[JohnyCanuck]

7. a former UK ambassador says it's not the Taliban

making the bucks off of the drug trade

Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time

by Craig Murray (former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan /JC)

SNIP

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government ? the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.

SNIP

Opium is produced all over Afghanistan, but especially in the north and north-east ? Dostum's territory. Again, our Government's spin doctors have tried hard to obscure this fact and make out that the bulk of the heroin is produced in the tiny areas of the south under Taliban control. But these are the most desolate, infertile rocky areas. It is a physical impossibility to produce the bulk of the vast opium harvest there.

That General Dostum is head of the Afghan armed forces and Deputy Minister of Defence is in itself a symbol of the bankruptcy of our policy. Dostum is known for tying opponents to tank tracks and running them over. He crammed prisoners into metal containers in the searing sun, causing scores to die of heat and thirst.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469983/Britain-protecting-biggest-heroin-crop-time.html