Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out

Oh dear it seems that Hamid Karzai the Mayor of Kabul, since he can't travel outside of the city and has no base anywhere else in Afghanistan, has finally had it with U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Kandahar. Seems that the poor Mayor who is Pashtun and is running for re-election as the U.S. puppet President, is exerting some independence. Criticizing the very folks who are doing his fighting for him.

Afghan security at a seven-year low

Afghanistan demands 'timeline' for end of military intervention

His corrupt government of warlords, opium growers, and former Taliban, have made no inroads in developing real governance over the country. So facing the simple fact that Kandahar is the Pashtun stronghold, and Karzai is Pashtun, he is calling on us to all leave. Heck that's what the NDP and the left in Canada has been saying for the past two years.

Karzai says US, NATO created 'parallel' government

This is a phony war. The supposed development of a liberal capitalist economy, with liberal bourgoise enlightment ideals like education for women and girls, human rights, the end of torture and capital punishment, freedom of speech and religion, none of this exists in this failed Islamic State.

So what the heck are we there fighting for? Simply put so that this U.S. puppet the Mayor of Kabul can keep his job and keep his crony goverment in power sharing the spoils of war and international aid. And of course once again Karzai bleames others while the reality is that his is a corrupt regime.

Karzai fires prominent minister

'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'

Mr. Karzai also blamed Afghanistan's endemic corruption in part on foreign contractors who "contract, then subcontract, and then another subcontract and then perhaps another subcontract." The process "means immense possibilities of major corruption."

The problems of Afghanistan are immense, at the heart of which lies the issue of trust. Time and again, in interviews with senior Western officials, I heard deep scepticism voiced about the ability of Karzai's government to use aid money wisely and effectively. As even the Afghan economics minister, Muhammed Jalil Shams, candidly admitted to me, for every $100 of Western aid given, only $40 finds its way to the intended projects. The rest disappears into the pockets of unscrupulous government officials. It is worth noting too that corruption surrounding the heroin trade, worth $3 billion a year, has further paralysed the government. A recent New York Times report identified the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a major beneficiary of the illegal trade. 'Corruption is the biggest problem facing Afghanistan,' Shams said. He went on to make the point that giving money to the Afghan government is still better than giving it to Western contractors to perform reconstruction jobs, when only 25 per cent of the money finds its way into the local Afghan community, but that is a tough argument to make to nervous aid donors and potential investors.

A recent survey conducted by the Asia Foundation is a good place to start. More than 6,500 Afghans were interviewed from all 34 of the country's provinces. It was the fourth public opinion poll conducted by the foundation since 2004, so it provides valuable perspective of the national mood of Afghans over time. Three quarters of those polled cite corruption as a major problem, especially at the highest levels of government. Fifty percent say it affects their daily lives. President Hamid Karzai's recent re-shuffling of his cabinet was intended to address this concern, which has undermined public confidence in his leadership.

Situation normal, all fouled up
Kabul businessman Nasrullah Rahmati rarely travels without a bodyguard but says his biggest security threat is not suicide bombers. "I have been robbed at gunpoint by our own police and I am more scared of them than I am of the Taliban," he said in his factory, where 250 workers make uniforms.
Afghanistan's politicians and government officials are as corrupt as the police, locals say, and a striking feature of Kabul is the "poppy palaces", mansions being built by strangely wealthy locals in a country that ranks behind only Somalia on the UN's list of the poorest and most dysfunctional countries. A British official working against the heroin trade jokes that the mansions are triumphs of "narchitecture". What is not so funny is the corrosive effect open corruption and poor governance have on the Afghan Government's legitimacy.
It seems to be conventional wisdom in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai is an important drug dealer, a view many US officials privately share. Installed by the Americans, then endorsed in national elections, Hamid Karzai is likely to retain US support in elections due next year despite his ineffective rule. Karzai certainly has been a disappointment to the relatively few educated liberals in Afghanistan, who say he is not the champion of liberal democracy that he seems to many in the West. He has not championed women's rights with any great vigour and local journalist union officials say he warned them some time ago that his support for free speech did not extend to issues relating to the Islamic faith. When death sentences were pursued against two men for publishing unapproved translations of the Koran, the President offered only a muted response.


Despite all the vain glory announcements by those who support this war, and by our Government and military, we are not defending a liberal capitalist state, women still wear burkhas, child brides (female and male) are still traded amongst villagers, local patriarchs rule and dominate the culture, Islamic courts jail Christians as well as editors who speak out,
women are attacked for going to school, girls schools are burned, attacks on women have increased, opium production has increased, Pashtuns are fighting against our troops and will continue to as they see us as invaders.

Strict Islamic rules creep their way back into Afghans' lives

In Afghanistan, Islamists' influence widens

UN rights chief condemns Afghan executions

Women lose in deal made with devil

Afghan justice: 'They should die'

The perils of treating women in Afghanistan

Food Crisis, Poverty Spur Child Marriages, Grim Realities for Girls

A woman's lot
Violence and other abuse of Afghan women is enough to make you wonder what we're there fighting for, reports Paul McGeough from Kabul.
International human rights officials in Kabul are privately explosive about what they see as a marked slide in human rights generally, but for women in particular - especially in light of demands by officials that they must play the glad game. "Can't be all doom and gloom," a senior foreign official regularly exhorts his frustrated staff. Amid the many mistakes in Afghanistan, there have been two constants. One is the Western obsession with winning a war while forgetting the welfare of the Afghan people - particularly women. The other is reducing the equation to a simplistic contest between the "good" President Hamid Karzai and the "bad" Taliban. For women, this pincers grip has knocked their rights to the bottom of the agenda. "Karzai operates like a mafia crook. His regime is corrupt, brutal and repressive and it is based on the President's umpteen deals with the devil - fundamentalists, warlords and criminals," a senior human rights figure told me privately this week. "But Karzai never acts alone. His regime was supposed to be different to the Taliban… and the Australian and the French and all the other governments [still] back him."
Karzai lurches from one crooked or corrupt power base to the next - one day pardoning brutal rapists and saying nothing about it; the next celebrating the execution of small-time criminals while the Mr Bigs of the criminal and political worlds are untouchable.


The Pashtun are delibertely identified by the Western forces and their media as Taliban, when in fact they are not. But they are fighting us as Karzai well knows, which is why he has called for peace talks and has called for U.S. and NATO forces to stop doing reconstruction, invading villagers homes and demanding a time line for so called victory over the Taliban. Which will never happen. Because the Taliban do not exist, who we are fighting are the Pashtun peoples of Southern Afghanistan.

Opium war impasse
About 250 of them had come to hear Governor Asadullah Hamdam's arguments about why they should give up growing opium poppies which, for many, were their primary source of income.
Then one elder from the village of Sorkh Murgab stood up and said what many of the farmers must have been thinking.
"The people don't have jobs," he said, according to notes taken by US government field officer Eric Bone during the November 26 meeting last year.
"The (Government) promised projects but we haven't seen them," the elder said. "The (Government tells us) there is not enough security to do projects. In the daytime the ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, comprising Australian and Dutch troops) is around but at night the Taliban come and force us to cultivate poppy. We have the poorest region, who can we listen to?"
Another elder stood up and joined the fray. "Assistance in the past two years has only been to the provincial administration, not to us. The people have not received assistance ... when people don't have jobs they go to the Taliban."
These exchanges, contained in a series of confidential documents written by anti-narcotic officials in Tarin Kowt and obtained by The Australian, reveal the magnitude of the task faced by Australia and the West in seeking to kill Afghanistan's opium trade, which reaps more than $4billion a year, almost half of Afghanistan's total income.


Karzai offers Taliban leader 'protection' for peace

Afghan president wishes he could down US planes

Britain 'bribes Afghans to fight Taleban'
Divided tribes make it hard to find elders who will helpTHE tribes in Helmand province have been heavily fractured by decades of fighting, and balance of power is now inextricably linked to the drugs trade.

An Interview About Afghani Women's Rights and Rebuilding in the Face of Politics
Homemakers Magazine editor-in-chief Kathy Ullyott reveals the complex situation the progress of women's rights are in the face of the presence of Western countries, Afghani politics, and nation rebuilding. This is the first of a three-part interview.
SD: Yes, exactly, the period of jihad against the Soviet Union, which we know was covertly backed by the U.S., the civil war, the emergence of the Taliban who were essentially let loose by Pakistan to make their way north…
KU: It’s very complicated, and that’s something else I discovered, and I still don’t think I’ve answered your question – as you say, it’s a big thing and impossible to get a handle on, some I realized there while talking to people. Here we think of the Taliban as some opposing force, but there the Taliban is really just the most organized of the many insurgent groups with different interests. Some of them are the Taliban, but others are warlords in a certain area, in a very ancient and tribal culture going back hundreds of years. Some of these are very vicious rivalries spanning loyalties. The Taliban tend to claim responsibility for any attacks, but that’s just PR. A lot of attacks have nothing to do with the Taliban. It’s really a very amorphous thing and very difficult to fight. And I’m not a military expert by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes the whole question very complex…
SD: People don’t realize the extent of the power of the warlords or how far it extends into rural areas…
KU: Totally – into the rural areas and into the government as well. The women I spoke to, the MP, and Horia…one of the greatest frustrations of the people there is that the government itself is so corrupt. And we’ve seen reports of that. That’s one of the things making progress so difficult. And of the things that created so much pessimism in the intervening years is that people within the country expected that (the ousting of the Taliban) was going to be a big change and that life was going to get better. And they are continuing to see that these warlords exercise great control over the government. The opium trade is one such situation. They (citizens) know that there are ‘bad guys’ still in power, the police force is still horribly corrupt, yet they had hoped-with the involvement of NATO – that the more developed world was going to help them get rid of this stuff. But it’s much harder than they expected.

We are not battling Islam we are battling a medival patriarchical fuedal culture which we are trying to transform into a liberal capitalist democracy. We are failing just like the Russians and before them the British.

Tariq Ali talks tough
The West doesn’t totally appreciate one simple factor: that the Afghan people do not like being occupied by foreign powers,” he said. “Most people don’t like being occupied by foreign powers.” Ali argued that Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy is complicated due to Karzai’s construction on prime Kabul property. He added that a New York Times report links his brother to drug smuggling (Karzai has denied the charges).

Retired general looks back on Russia's Afghan war
Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times
THE GENERAL'S VIEW: Retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev says the key to U.S. success would be to help set up a sovereign government. Moscow and Washington have made the same mistakes in their conflicts there, says Ruslan Aushev. He offers advice for the U.S. as it enters the eighth year of war.We said, "Afghans, you are living according to the Soviet way of life, where religion is separated from the state, mullahs should be expelled, religion is the opiate of the people. You'll be living in collective farms. You will have pioneer camps, Comsomol [youth] organizations, and so on and so forth." The Soviet way of life in a country that still lives in the Dark Ages!And what did you say? You said, "We are giving you democracy." They cannot even translate the term properly. Under us there was a lot of corruption, and today there's a lot of corruption. Neither under you nor under us did an ordinary person get anything

There has been massive internal displacement, especially in the south as a result of the insurgency - which has intensified since 2006. The number of people being killed in the Afghan conflict has soared in recent years as violence has returned to levels not seen since the Taleban were driven from power in 2001.
The UN says that from January to August 2008 1,445 civilians were killed - a rise of 39% on the same period for 2007. Most deaths were attributed to the Taleban but the number of civilians killed by pro-government forces - the majority in air strikes - also rose sharply. Afghan and foreign forces say hundreds of militants have also been killed - it is impossible to verify precise numbers. Military fatalities among foreign and Afghan forces have also soared.

A number of analysts also say the United States and the broad coalition of international actors in Afghanistan will have to vastly improve reconstruction efforts that have failed to resolve severe problems since the Taliban's ouster in 2001. Drought, poverty, and persistent unemployment (World Factbook) in one of the world's poorest countries now mix with a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda as chief concerns for the international community. Aid organizations are warning food shortages and early snows could leave as many as eight million Afghans starving this winter (IRIN) -- 30 percent of the population. Some observers now say famine will outpace violence as Afghanistan's top crisis in coming months. "Whatever the effect of insurgent violence on the UN-mandated mission in Afghanistan," the London-based Royal United Services Institute said in an October briefing, "it is widespread hunger and malnutrition that will place a greater obstacle in its progress."


SEE:
Afghanistan the UNwinnable war
Afghanistan A Failed State


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Manley Whines

On Don Newman's Politics show yesterday Newman interviewed John Manley about his recommendations to the Harprocrites about Afghanistan.Manley complained, predictably, about media coverage of the war. His example was interesting he said a press conference had been set up to show the success of a CIDA program in Kabul, but it happened the same day another Canadian soldier had been killed. He complained that this good news story then got lost while the media covered the soldiers death, his ramp ceremony and his return to Canada.

Now I won't comment on the callousness of this example. Rather I found it interesting that the good news story was Kabul, not Kandahar. We are doing little PRT work in Kandahar, mostly it is support for infrastructure needed for the troops.

Our real aid work is still occurring in the North in Kabul. So why are we in the south. Manley undermines his argument for Harpers War in the South. Instead the NDP is proven right again, we need to withdraw our troops from counter insurgency operations and move them back to the North, to defend the PRT projects that are really what we should be doing. And of course backing the malleable Karzai government in its attempts to come to a peace agreement with the Taliban and Pashtun war lords.

Mullah Naqib shakes hands with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in March, less than two months after the Kandahar elder helped free the main suspect in Glyn Berry’s death.


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Surprise

Don't Bother Writing Us

Rogues Gallery

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Taliban Karzai

Well, well, once again it appears that the NDP has had the right policy towards Afghanistan all along.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has offered to meet personally with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and another top insurgent for peace talks.

Something Karzai would have told Parliament if his speech had not been ghost written for him by the Department of Defense. They took particular pains to single out the NDP for criticism in support of their Kandahar operations.

He also took direct aim at NDP Leader Jack Layton's opposition to the war, saying that those who believe the mission was weighted too heavily toward combat and not enough toward reconstruction were wrong.

And while Peter Mackay's office denies it the facts at the time bear it out. Because Layton met Karzai and they discussed peace talks.

The irony is that while Jack promotes peace talks, and is blasted for it being called Taliban Jack, Harper actually has hung out with Warlords connected to the Taliban.

One Blogging Tory tries to spin the bad news this way;

The Difference Between NDP Surrender & Afhganistan Democracy

Once again providing disinformation by generalization; that the NDP is calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Which it isn't. Its calling for withdrawal from Kandahar with reduced forces stationed in Kabul doing peace keeping.

And actually would it be any different in Afghanistan if the Taliban were part of parliament? He asked tongue in cheek.


A woman casts her ballot in Afghanistan’s
September 18, 2005, election, for which
Canada provided support.
Afghan voters elected the members
of the Wolesi Jirga (lower chamber
of the National Assembly) and
representatives of 34 provincial councils.


Also See:

NDP

Afghanistan




Job Protection for

Canadian Reservists

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Narco Politics

The British alternative is what? More civilian deaths from air strikes?

British diplomat opposes legalized Afghan poppy crop

Britain’s top diplomat in Canada has dismissed a poll, commissioned by the international think-tank that is championing the legalization of Afghanistan’s contentious opium poppy crop, which shows that Canadians overwhelmingly support for the use of Afghan opium for medicinal purposes.

Cary was responding to the release of an Ipsos Reid survey of 1,000 Canadians, conducted on behalf of the Senlis Council, which found that nearly eight in 10 Canadians (79 per cent) want Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get behind an international pilot project that would help transform Afghanistan’s illicit opium cultivation into a legal source for codeine, morphine and other legitimate pain medications for the international market.

Oh so you could do it just that after six years you don't have the infrastructure.....right-o that's why Harper sent our troops into the Opium Fields. The effectiveness of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams can be measured in opium production.

Cary noted that while opium production has been licensed in such places as Thailand and Turkey, it took 15 years to achieve such a system. Afghanistan simply lacks the infrastructure and regulatory framework to cultivate opium legally and to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers, he said.

And for the British who created this problem in the 19th Century in order to expand their Empire to be telling us they oppose legalization, well that is a bit rich isn't it. They have a history of creating infrastructure and regulations for opium production.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization.

Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines.

This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports.

The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history.

Chickens, home, roost.

And after all this is a British problem, which they created back then and again today in Afghanistan.

Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand

The vast increase in opium poppy farming in Afghanistan is indicative of an inability to grasp a basic law of economics

The British government for sure knows how to do one thing. It knows how to help farmers in need. Since it arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and was put in charge of the staple poppy crop, ministers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting it. On Monday the United Nations announced the result. Poppy production in Afghanistan has soared since the invasion, this year alone by 34%. The harvest in the British-occupied protectorate of Helmand rose by 50% in 12 months. This is a dazzling triumph for agricultural intervention.

Ministers may deny this was their policy, but they cannot be that inept. They faced a heroin epidemic at home. Suddenly finding themselves charged with controlling almost all the world's opium production, they must have known what they were doing. By alienating farmers and forcing them into the arms of the Taliban, they would drive up illicit production and encourage oversupply. While that would increase heroin consumption in Britain in the short term, as it has done, oversupply would eventually cause prices to collapse. At that point, the British policy of "poppy substitution" with wheat and other crops would start to bite and supply would be stifled. What happened when that stifling drove prices back up again was someone else's concern.

I cannot think of any less daft explanation for a policy that otherwise defies every law of economics. Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister responsible for flooding British streets with cheap heroin, may squabble with his American colleagues over whether poppy eradication is better than substitution, but one thing is certain. Since Nato arrived in Afghanistan, opium has become to the local economy what oil is to a Gulf state. It is roughly 60% of the domestic product and 90% of exports, with productivity per hectare rising by the year.

Those into conspiracy theories might be forgiven for thinking this might also be a policy of the CIA to destabilize Iran by increasing the number of heroin addicts in that country.

Despite US suspicions, Iran - which has one of the world's highest drug addiction rates - argues that it has legitimate interests in combating the influx of heroin and opiates from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. More than 3,000 Iranian police and security personnel have been killed in clashes with drug smugglers along the Afghan border since 1979.

Legalization would of course cure this problem by recognizing drug addiction as a medical problem, a curse of capitalism, rather than a crime.

The year 2009 will mark the centennial of the Shanghai Opium Conference, the first world-wide agreement on the reduction of opium use and production. China, then still an extremely poor feudal nation, was spending most of its foreign exchange on opium it imported through British traders. The British sold their cheap Indian Opium for pure silver to the Chinese, and had almost two centuries of opium fortune-making behind them. The fledgling United States of America tried to conquer a share of the profits in this lavish market, at a time when prohibitionist ideas about alcohol and opium control were expanding all over the globe. It was time for the American Disease to be born.

But don't expect support for that from Bush or Harper. They represent the traditional prohibitionist culture of social conservative Christians. The folks who oppose heroin legalization used to oppose the 'demon rum'.

In later analyses of the history of drug and alcohol controls other names for the American Disease have been coined. The most appropriate one, not tied to any nationality per se, is the 'Temperance Movement'. It was comprised of a collective of local movements prevalent in a group of nations. Later these nine nations would be identified as a special group, the nations where the temperance culture would endorse far reaching control policies in the attempt to regulate medical and recreational drugs. The global impact of these temperance cultures has varied from almost nothing to considerable.

Meanwhile it is telling that not only are Afhgani's the largest producers of opium they are also its victims.

Afghanistan is hooked on opium. The drugs trade has become the largest employer, its biggest export and the main source of income in a land devastated by decades of war. Opium is grown on 10 per cent of the farmland and employs 13 per cent of the population as labourers, guards and transport workers.

The ubiquity of the drug has now created the world's worst domestic drug problem, a crisis threatening to engulf any hope of economic revival. The first nationwide survey on drug use, by the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, estimated that one million in this nation of 30 million were addicts, including 100,000 women and 60,000 children.

Defending the rights of Afghani women and children, the mantra of the Harpocrites used to justify their warmongering. And their war efforts have resulted in increased addictions amongst women and children. That surely is a measure of success of this mission.




SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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Opiate Of The Masses

Iran suffers from being the conduit for Afghanistan opium and heroin. It more than any other country is directly affected by the increased narcotic production in Afghanistan.

While the Canadian media hyped the latest UN Drug Report on the increased opium production in Afghanistan quoting the RCMP claim that we are getting more heroin from there than from the old Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle; Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. was the result of the CIA's involvement with black ops there during the Viet Nam war as Afghanistan production is a result of CIA involvement during the anti-Soviet offensive. The fact remains that NATO and American operations against opium production in Afghanistan have been a failure because they have no real alternative to the value of this agricultural product a historic crop in the region. A product first used by British Imperialism to spread its power through out Asia in the 19th Century.

However, in Afghanistan as in other parts of the world, in Burma for example, opium has long been at stake in armed conflicts as its trade has allowed these conflicts to be prolonged. As the complex history of opium in Asia demonstrates, opium production and trade have been central to world politics and geopolitics for centuries and the role of the opium economy in Afghanistan does not represent a new trend. In many ways, history reinvents itself.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization. Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines. This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports. The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history. Eventually, opium consumption and addiction also spurred tremendous opium production in China. In response to the Chinese national consumption that drained its silver reserves, China became the world’s foremost opium producer.

This trend emerged first in Laos and in Burma, then in Afghanistan in what came to be known as the Golden Crescent. In both Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Communist covert operations and secret wars benefited from the participation of some drug-related combat units or individual actors who, to finance their struggles, were directly involved in drug production and trade. To cite just two, the Hmong in Laos and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan’s opium production is the direct outcome of Cold War rivalries and conflicts waged by proxies who helped develop a thriving narcotic economy in the country. Afghanistan has been the world’s leading opium-producing country for years now, with Burma and Laos ranking second and third respectively.

And NATO has not engaged the Iranians in controlling the border and transit points used by the opium producers in Afghanistan. And they will continue to fail until they engage the Iranians as allies in the fight against opium.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a major transit route for opiates smuggled from Afghanistan and through Pakistan to the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Russia, and Europe. The largest single share of opiates leaving Afghanistan (perhaps 60 percent) passes through Iran to consumers in Iran itself, Russia and Europe. There is no evidence that narcotics transiting Iran reach the United States in an amount sufficient to have a significant effect. There are some indications that opium poppy cultivation is making a comeback in Iran, after a long period during which poppy cultivation was negligible. There are an estimated 3 million opiate abusers in Iran, with 60 percent reported as addicted to various opiates and 40 percent reported as casual users. With record levels of opium production right next door in Afghanistan, the latest opiate seizure statistics from Iran continue to suggest Iran is experiencing an epidemic of drug abuse, especially among its youth.

And contrary to the RCMP reports in the press, the United States government report above states that NO Afghani opium is getting into North America. Now do ya think the RCMP may be doing a bit of PR for their pal the PM to justify his war in Afghanistan?

NATO has relied upon American forces practicing large scale opium field eradication supported by air strikes which has led to large scale civilian deaths and friendly fire deaths to NATO forces.

Joanna Nathan
International Crisis Group analyst

Aerial eradication of poppies is not the solution. While some ground-based manual eradication is important as a stick, to discourage particularly new growers, it hits the poorest hardest. Aerial eradication can be too indiscriminate and would enrage a large sector of the population possibly driving them into the arms of the insurgents. On the other hand the proposal to license opium for medicinal use is unfeasible at this stage. Most of the drugs grown in Afghanistan are in Helmand which they haven't been able to stop when it is completely illegal. How would you then insert a massive licensing bureaucracy there and stop those who continue to grow for the black market? The price differentials would be so large there would be no incentive to grow for a licensed market.

The American war on opium production, like the rest of its Afghanistan mission, has been a failure, since it is America's allies in Helmand Province that turn out to be the opium producers themselves.

Eradication in Helmand

This season, the governor of Helmand asked the AEF to eradicate in Helmand. Despite making progress due to the AEF's heavy use of mechanized eradication, insecurity and waning political will hindered the AEF's efforts. Helmand will likely continue to be Afghanistan's largest opium cultivating province. Any future eradication strategy for Helmand needs to first account for security and political will.

It should be noted that 75% of the opium poppy cultivation in Helmand is new cultivation that did not exist two years ago. By definition, then, at least 75% of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who lack licit economic alternatives-two years ago these farmers were doing something else.

In other words, the vast majority of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who have been growing poppy for generations and lack economic alternatives. The reality is that cultivation has expanded rapidly in the past two years as opportunists have scrambled to exploit Helmand's lawlessness for profit. Many of Helmand's poppy growers are wealthy land-owners, corrupt officials, and other opportunists. Helmand's land is fertile; infrastructure and access to markets is good, and alternatives to poppy are available. Moreover, if Helmand were a country, it would be the fifth largest recipient of U.S. development aid in the world, having received over $270 million in USAID funds in recent years. Opium poppy grown by wealthy land-owners and corrupt officials funds the insurgency. There is no reason to avoid eradicating their poppy fields aggressively.

SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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