Afghanistant Produces 87% of the worlds Opium supply now

that was the real reason for developing such accurate targetting,.. so they wouldn't hit the poppy fields by accident

So much for the republicans and their war on drugs....


uhhhh... terror?




Which one was it again???

Turn on CNN. They're showing the Afghan presidential inauguaration.

In the audience are warlords that control the poppy fields.

my backyard is the other 13%

Great just what this world needs. People that are fucked up messing with oil pipelines.

Now thats what i call liberation

Who said oil was the only gold out there

DH

i gotta visit there sometime

hehe ;]

It's not like any country, even us, could go over there and truly interrupt their number 1 crop. They would call one helluva Jihad on us if we did.

I heard that statistic a while ago on the news and it got me thinking. How much do governments around the world spend on the war on drugs. Think abou thow much damage you could do to the heroin trade if you simply paid the farmers to not grow these crops. The reason they grow it is that it earns them something like 5 times as much as any other crop. Surely paying them off at the very beginning would be cheaper than fighting it down the line.

The people that grow these things aren't all criminals. Many of them are just ordinary farmers trying to get by. Who could resist an offer to multiply their income by 5 for the same work?

god is trying to send the US a msg, pay close attention.

Oh well time to blow em up.

...and to think the U.S. is using mercenary companies to fly defoliation missions over the coca fields of Colombia.

GOD = Gold Oil Drugs to republicans. That's why Bush always says he loves GOD

You liberated the poppy producers from the Taliban.....

One of my youth-friends who smoked weed like many other ppl now smokes Opium
It's only fucking 5? / gram

Same warlords that are going to fight American troops and America in a few years, ...
Endless loop ...

Yep. And they use an American management system now as well.

Don't expect the current bonanza of drugs flowing out of Afghanistan to stop anytime soon. Too much of that countries economy is based on the flow of drug money. While a huge share goes to a select few warlords, everyone from the farmers to the grocery stores rely on that money to keep flowing. Its not like the US installed puppet leader is about to start replacing that money and the USA sure doesnt want to. Afghanistan will remain completely fucked like it is for a long while to come. The country has nothing the USA really wants, and therein lies the root of their problem.

KRLs news always surprise me...

What ya mean? Their leader (and US president) is a cokehead.

Actually the production of opium had almost completely stopped under the Taliban, it's only started again since the war. Afghanistan has one thing America wants, the land for their oil pipeline. That's why the bases they've made go along the pipeline route, and they've left the rest of the country to the warlords. If they didn't have anything the neo cons wanted, you wouldn't be there. That war has about as much to do with Bin Laden as the Iraq war does.

don't use facts and logic please


stick to irrational name calling and threats to nuke people into submission..thanks

kinda funny, I was just thinking the same thing...


how UNpatriotic of me... lol

lol

I think it's higher than 87%

In god we trust

They are run by the military but technically it's a civilian company, all the pilots are also civilians. I used to know the guy in charge of that entire operation, he was the only military officer in the whole deal.

I came very close to joining the army reserves to get my flight training so I could fly for him. However I had just turned 28 at the time and the army wouldn't put me in flight training becouse they said I was too old.

Sucks ass cause that would have been a killer job. Lots of action and IMO would have been very fun.

Feb 9. 2005

Afghan opium poppy crops shrink

By N.C. Aizenman
The Washington Post

Girdi Ghous, Afghanistan - Across Afghanistan, government officials and foreign aid workers who monitor poppy cultivation have reached a remarkable conclusion: One year after Afghan farmers planted the largest amount of poppy in their nation's history and provided the world with nearly 90 percent of its opium supply, many of them have stopped growing it.

Poppy farming, officials said, may have declined by as much as 70 percent in three provinces that together account for more than half of Afghanistan's production: Nangahar in the east, Helmand in the south and Badakhshan in the north.

In Nangahar, where last spring poppies bloomed all along the main road from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, to the Pakistani border, the contrast is striking.

"I visited 16 out of 22 districts and I couldn't find a single plant of poppy," marveled Mirwais Yasini, head of the Afghan government's counternarcotics directorate. "It was all wheat."

Several factors may be responsible, including a drop in opium prices after the previous banner harvest, and a reluctance to plant among farmers whose crops were destroyed last season by disease or the police.

Afghan officials, however, say the news vindicates President Hamid Karzai's decision to reject an anti-poppy aerial spraying campaign, which had been promoted by the U.S. government, in favor of a more consensus-based "Afghan solution."

Karzai voiced concerns that spraying would cause health and environmental problems and antagonize farmers; several foreign nonprofit aid groups here also opposed the idea.

Instead, the president used appeals to national and religious pride, the promise of international aid and the threat of crop destruction to persuade village and tribal leaders to curb poppy cultivation voluntarily.

Yet the very success of this new policy creates tremendous challenges in a nation where opium cultivation and trafficking made up more than a third of the economy last year and sustained many thousands of poor rural families.

"People will need other sources of income as soon as possible, or we'll be the witness to a big disaster," said Gen. Muhammad Daoud, the deputy interior minister in charge of counternarcotics. "People may even face starvation."

Col. David Lamm, chief of staff for the U.S. military command in Afghanistan, said he was optimistic that Kabul's assertions of progress in reducing poppy production would prove true.

"Can you put it under your mattress and let the price go up? Yes," he said, but he added that since Karzai told farmers not to plant, "they are not planting."

International donors have pledged millions to help Afghanistan combat drugs this year; the United States pledged about $780 million.

About $120 million of the U.S. package has been earmarked for work on irrigation canals, to improve roads, to offer micro credit, and to obtain better seeds and fertilizers so poppy workers can make a living from other crops and industries.

In Nangahar, the first phase of that effort has already begun, with plans to hire about 50,000 workers to do jobs such as clearing irrigation canals.

In a largely symbolic gesture, the U.S. government has distributed 500 metric tons of wheat seeds in Nangahar - enough for less than 5 percent to 10 percent of farmers, Afghan officials said.

That sad.

you guys wanna get high?

They use the poppyseeds for bagels, you dumb fucks.

That sounds a nice idea... another fuckup to compound the first fuckup :-)

I was chatting to a DEA person and mentioned that US marines were embarking on an island to burn out drug growing areas.

He commented... So that's what they are getting them to do, - it's a pity then don't make the effort to give the farmers something better to grow and earn from, than just burn their crop and piss them off.

Oddly, he seemed to make sense :-)

Webby,

It's a great idea. See the article above. We've given them 500 metric tons of wheat seeds so far. Now let's give them 5000 more. Many afghan farmers are already giving up opium production. (See article above)

Thats hardly news m8, it has been this way for quite some time

And it's Al-Quaeda first source of revenu !

Thats a WMD Bush should have gone after instead of something that didn´t exist in Iraq.

This thread was bumped with an updated article BTW. Not posted today

You should pass that info along to Tony Blair. It, might help him if he has to answer the same questions again in the House of Commons as he faced a couple of months ago. Last time he had some difficulty dealing with questioners more inclined towards the alarmist point of view. And BTW when did the president get enough security to be able to leave Kabul, let alone enough control to start dealing with the opium problem?

Still I guess anything is possible. If it is true, let's hope the Afghans have better luck getting a decent price for their legitimate crops than so many of Columbia's former coffee farmers did...

Love is a battlefield

I'm sure someone will mention the Washington Post article to him.

Pretty typical the US govt wanted to just dump chemicals all over the place. At least they accepted the Afghan president's decision rather than doing it anyway.

They always did that and they will always do

Does anyone care to venture where the Bush family got it money before oil...;)

Here's a hint... East India Company...