Stopping Traffickers Will Hurt Taliban KABUL -- The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border. Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park. To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named. [continues 759 words]
KABUL -- The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border. Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park. To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named. [continues 689 words]
KABUL - The product is hidden in transport trucks, hauled on the back of donkeys and finally spirited through villages that straddle Afghanistan's northern border. Being part of the world's largest heroin industry certainly has its benefits but the work, says one Afghan drug smuggler, is no walk in the park. To move narcotics from Afghanistan's Pashtun belt -- where Canadian troops operate -- to Tajikistan, smugglers risk arrest by the police, theft at the hands of other criminals, or worse, says the Kabul-based courier, who asked not to be named. [continues 440 words]
Efforts To Cut Off Taliban Funding. Some NATO Countries Raise Concerns About Counter-Narcotics Operations Canadian troops in Afghanistan will soon target opium-processing laboratories and high-level drug barons in an effort to cut off funding for the Taliban, says Canada's top soldier. But Canadian Forces personnel will not conduct operations to eradicate poppy fields, says General Walter Natynczyk, chief of the Defence staff. This month, NATO defence ministers agreed to target Afghan drug networks in an attempt to reduce the amount of money the Taliban has to fund its insurgency. [continues 393 words]
VICTORIA -- Canadian troops in Afghanistan will soon target opium-processing laboratories and high-level drug barons in an effort to cut off funding for the Taliban, says Canada's top soldier. But Canadian Forces personnel will not conduct operations to eradicate poppy fields, says Gen. Walter Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff. Earlier this month, NATO defence ministers agreed to target Afghan drug networks in an attempt to reduce the amount of money the Taliban has to fund its insurgency. NATO officials estimate the Taliban receive between $80 and $100 million a year from the drug trade, either by taxing the production and transportation of opium, or from payments from drug lords who want protection. [continues 150 words]
The United States on Thursday pushed NATO allies to order their troops to target Afghanistan's thriving heroin trade in a bid to stem the flow of drug money to the widening insurgency against the troubled international military mission. A two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers comes amid an increase in violence that has created doubts about whether Western forces can win the war against the resurgent Taliban militants. "If we have the opportunity to go after drug lords and drug laboratories and try and interrupt this flow of cash to the Taliban, that seems to me like a legitimate security endeavor," said U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the meeting. [continues 542 words]
WASHINGTON -- When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss. Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Mr. Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times. He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck. [continues 1762 words]
Heroin Addiction On Rise, Tehran Official Warns Britain Points To Decrease In Land Used For Cultivation Young Iranians are paying the price for NATO's "failure" to curb opium production in neighbouring Afghanistan, according to the Iranian government. Iran's deputy foreign minister, Mehdi Safari, made the complaint at the end of a three-day visit to Britain, after talks with the foreign secretary, David Miliband, and other Foreign Office and Downing Street officials, in an attempt to improve relations. One of the few areas of cooperation between Iran and Britain is counter-narcotics, but Safari expressed frustration at what the Iranian government sees as a lack of progress. [continues 407 words]
Afghanistan Need Small Loans To Grow Wheat An old man waits with his two sons outside of a United Nation's distribution centre on a scorching August day in Kandahar City. They have been enticed from the Arghandab district west of the city by the promise of a single bag of wheat to take back to their impoverished family. He says he arrived here at 8 a.m., but four hours later he, along with dozens of others, still doesn't have his wheat, and he's losing his patience. [continues 624 words]
New figures from the United Nations to be released this week are set to reveal that opium production in the southern regions of Afghanistan has soared. The worst affected province is Helmand, where 7,000 British soldiers are deployed. Officials are likely to stress successes in the north and east of the country, where the number of provinces free of poppy is set to rise. Last year 13 provinces across the country were declared free of opium cultivation - largely in the relatively secure north. [continues 348 words]
Recent Meeting at Canadian Embassy With Impatient U.S. Envoy Left Afghan Politicians Feeling Bitter and Insulted KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Long-simmering tensions between the Afghan government and its Western supporters over the opium trade have broken out into angry confrontations behind closed doors recently, including a stormy recent meeting at the Canadian embassy. Accounts vary about exactly what happened when U.S. Ambassador William Wood sat down with his Canadian counterpart and a gathering of Kandahar's political leaders on July 12, but five sources who attended the session described it as a strong sign of rising U.S. impatience with the local government's stand on drugs. [continues 1017 words]
Ex-Drug Dealer James Brett Has Beaten His Own Demons. He Tells Mark Collings He Now Hopes to Take on the Opium Growers - With Pomegranates 'Pomegranates are the answer to all this,' said James Brett, as we drove past the colourless, mud-brick villages and makeshift graveyards that litter the parched landscape of Nangarhar province. We were on our way to Markoh, a small village 40 minutes' drive inside the Afghan border with Pakistan. Brett first visited Markoh in April 2007. On his way to a seminar in Kabul, he had asked the driver to stop the car so that he could speak to a reed-thin figure extracting opium from the poppies. [continues 1170 words]
Taliban Windfall Puts Troops At Risk OTTAWA -Canadian soldiers escorting me outside a remote Afghan National Army base last summer didn't give it a second thought as their boots crunched thousands of dried poppy bulbs sapped of their narcotic resin. It was, after all, Kandahar -- now more than ever an incubator for most of the world's opium supply. Raked into metre-high piles, the empty pods were the residue of a largest-ever poppy crop in a country that feeds 92% of the planet's heroin addictions, according to the latest United Nations World Drug Report. [continues 650 words]
Almas Bawar Zakhilwal, an Afghani living in Canada, says the poppy eradication program in his country is a failure and stepping it up would only fuel the war. Canadian troops are not part of the poppy eradication program; it has been contracted out to DynCorp International, an American company, which also provides bodyguards for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. "Billions have been spent with no success," Zakhilwal said in a telephone interview. Zakhilwal is Canadian representative of the Senlis Council, a Paris-based organization which advocates licensing poppy production to make medical morphine. [continues 285 words]
To mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, which falls on June 26, Perspective today begins a series of articles related to drug problems in Thailand and the region. In the following article, JAMES EMERY looks at the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taleban are, and have always been, drug traffickers. Afghanistan's 2008 opium crop is expected to produce similar yields as last year's record of 8,243 metric tonnes, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). [continues 842 words]
GARMSER, Afghanistan - The Marines of Bravo Company's 1st Platoon sleep beside a field of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant's gooey resin smile and wave. Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world's largest region for growing opium poppy, and now they find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin. [continues 310 words]
In Afghanistan, Compensating For Ruined Crops Is A Tricky Task; Canadian Forces PANJWAII DISTRICT, Afghanistan - When paying compensation to Afghans for collateral damage from military operations, Canadian Forces have drawn a line in the sand where the poppies grow. Soldiers in the Mushan region were in a unique bind recently after their 83-vehicle convoy rumbled over two crops -- one wheat, one poppy -- to set up an overnight security perimeter. Land was torn up and both crops ground into the mud. The wheat farmer would have to be compensated, but the poppy growers presented a Catch-22. Replacement Canadian and Afghanistan soldiers in the region had just arrived that day. Angering locals by not paying for poppies was a poor start for soldiers about to forge new relationships. But the alternative was to finance the drug trade. [continues 356 words]
The assault in the east is the latest by militants against government teams responsible for destroying the opium poppy crop. U.S. Marines encounter little resistance in their offensive in the south. KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- A suicide bomber and gunmen attacked a drug-eradication team in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 40 others, authorities said. Twelve police officers were among the dead in the assault, the latest in a string of attacks by militants against government teams responsible for destroying the lucrative opium poppy crop during the planting season. The insurgency is fueled with profits from the drug trade. [continues 438 words]
Lack of support from foreign troops for Afghanistan's poppy-eradication operation costing lives, he says KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN -- Foreign troops have undermined the Afghan government's poppy-eradication campaign in Kandahar, the governor says, and the lack of support has added to the risks of the operation. At least 13 police have been killed and one reported missing during poppy eradication so far this month, and the task has been more difficult, Governor Asadullah Khalid said, because his NATO allies refuse to help and, in some cases, appear to be blocking the effort. [continues 539 words]
Treatment Centers for Women Reflect Increasing Opium Use KABUL -- The first days were so painful that Mina Gul could barely sit upright. Thin and lanky with wide brown eyes, she rubbed the back of her neck ceaselessly with fingers stained reddish black by an opium pipe. She couldn't shake the nausea. The light was almost blinding in the clean, white-walled medical clinic, where she lay crumpled in bed for days. Before that, opium had been about the only thing keeping Gul afloat. It started four years ago with the headaches. A relative told her to try a bit of opium as a cure. "I tried it once a little -- then the next day more, then more again, and then I was addicted," Gul said. [continues 639 words]
Inside Afghanistan
