I assure you , no drugs are in Afghanistan. These are lies !
Posted on 07/28/2008 2:06:15 PM PDT by forkinsocket
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.
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.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When I attended an Afghanistan briefing for Anne Patterson on Dec. 1, 2005, soon after she became assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs, she turned to me with her characteristic smile and said, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” We had just learned that in the two previous months Afghan farmers had planted almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of 165,000 hectares (637 square miles).
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Not if the price of wheat keeps rising.
Easy. Just send a committee of casino owners over from Las Vegas. In 5 years you will have a very peaceful country, and the oil barrons from all over the ME will go there to gamble and smoke their hootkas.
Cha- Ching!
Yes it is, and it’s next door neighbor Pakistan is even moreso, as has been proven by macroeconomic analysis of the country’s cash reserves, etc.
Nawaz Sharif - the PM who was ousted by Moosh and who is now politicking to regain his seat with his pro-Islamist party - is also the brother-in-law of Pakistan’s biggest heroin dealer.
The generally useless United Nations does have a pretty decent report on the Pak/Afghan opiate business.
http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghan-winter-survey-Feb08-short.pdf
Well it’s not like they’ve got a lot of high value export. Gotta make the money however you can.
I assure you , no drugs are in Afghanistan. These are lies !
Great, a drug war guy trying to tell us how to win in Afghanistan. Given their track record of perpetual failure, the only thing that Thomas Schweich can produce is a recipe for an endless war in Afganistan, more crime here, and more corruption in both places. The Pentagon is treating him appropriately by ignoring him.
Stopping drugs from getting into the US is worthy of our efforts. Stopping drugs from being cultivated overseas, especially in a country at war, gets more dicey.
Seems like the key is keeping the money away from the Taliban.
Colombia is managing; FARC was narco financed too, and they are just about done.
wonder why the writer conveniently ignores the role of the rogue CIA in the poppy trade.
Worthy? Since when is the impossible worthy?
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